


Aiutami

by imunbreakabledude



Series: Aiutami [1]
Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: Canon Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Post-Canon, Post-Season/Series 02, Speculation, come for the gay longing, season 3 spec, stay for the gratuitous high school level italian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-16
Updated: 2019-12-04
Packaged: 2020-12-17 06:54:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 24,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21050153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imunbreakabledude/pseuds/imunbreakabledude
Summary: Eve wakes up in a hospital in Italy with only one thought in her head: "I have to find her." (Set after Season 2 finale. Spoilers through Season 2.)





	1. Emergency Exit

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eve wakes up in a hospital in Italy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **EDIT:** I'm back now that the fic is complete! Thanks for everyone who read along and supported me in turning this one-shot I wrote on a whim into a full eight-chapter journey. 
> 
> Originally, I had left the bits of Italian in this fic untranslated because Eve does not speak Italian, but I learned how to do a cool thing from another fic, so now you can hover over any Italian text in this fic and get an English translation!
> 
> Hope you enjoy! Original notes below :)  
\-----  
First time writing for this fandom. Also the first fanfic I've written in about six years. Had fun! Might write a follow up while I desperately wait for Season 3.

Eve wakes up in a hospital in Italy.

At least that’s where she appears to be. Hospital, definitely – bed, machines, tubes. Everything beyond that is an ugly gray blur.  
Italy? Most likely. That’s where she was before. And she couldn’t have gone too far, surely, with a gunshot wound through her torso.

There was a gunshot, right? That’s what her memory seems to indicate. She remembers turning away. Loud bang. Then a fall. Ouch. Black. And Villanelle had a gun. _She had the gun the whole time._

Eve blinks a few times and decides to focus on probing the grey blurry edges of her vision to scour for more information. Walls begin to form with solid edges. A clock on the wall. It’s either three thirty or six fifteen, she can’t tell which hand is which. Moving her head seems to be too large a project to take on, so she shifts her eyes as far to the left as she can to examine the machines next to her. A button by the side of the bed says something in red letters, which unblur themselves after another blink: _Aiuto._ So it is Italy after all.

Closer examination of her own state reveals that she’s in a hospital gown and she’s got an IV going into her arm. That answers the question of why she feels no pain that one would expect to go hand in hand with a gunshot wound.

Now that’s she’s starting to become properly awake, questions press forward, swelling up to the edges of her skull. _How long have I been here? Who brought me here? Was it her? Is she still here now?_

She dismisses those questions, not knowing the answers but confident that she probably wouldn’t like them if she did.

She contemplates waiting for something to happen. Waiting seems like an altogether practical thing to do when recovering from a wound and pumped so full of drugs that lifting her head seems like a herculean task. But then again, waiting leaves nothing to contemplate besides the unpleasant questions, or trying to decide whether it’s really three o'clock or six o'clock, not to mention the exciting follow-up debate, _AM or PM?_

She wiggles a finger to confirm she still has the capability, then slowly pries her left arm up from where it’s wedged in the bed and presses the button to call for _Aiuto._

Eve counts to seventy-one before the nurse arrives. Longer than one would hope for in a genuine medical emergency.

_“Buona sera, signora,”_ the nurse greets her gently.

“How long have I been here?” Eve decides to cut to the chase.

The nurse stumbles on his words for a minute as he makes the mental switch from Italian to English. “About ten hours. You are lucky,” he adds. “No major damage. You will be as good as new after a bit more rest.”

_Not lucky,_ Eve thinks. The shot was carefully placed, that’s one thing she’s sure of.

“You are American?” the Nurse asks as he starts noting down Eve’s vitals.

“No. Who brought me in?” Eve replies.

“Oh. I thought from your accent…” The nurse hesitates, hoping he hasn’t offended.

“Who brought me in?” Eve repeats.

“I am not sure. I can check the records…”

“So there’s no one still here? No one waiting for me?”

“Not here. Signora, how is your memory? Do you remember what happened before…” The nurse struggles with his words. Eve wonders if it’s the language barrier or if he’s debating how forward he’s allowed to be with a patient without getting fired. “Do you remember who was with you when this injury occurred?”

“Are you asking who shot me?”

_“Mi dispiace,_ Signora.”

For a second, Eve contemplates telling the truth. She contemplates doing exactly as she should and taking the most rational course towards healing and justice. _Yes, I remember who shot me. My psychopathic maybe-girlfriend asked me to run away with her to Alaska, and when I tried to leave, she shot me in the back. She’s slippery but she can’t be far. Get the police and tell them to search for the pretty twenty six year old with the honey-blonde hair and the striking fashion sense. She’s probably on her way to Alaska right now._

But even setting aside her self-destructive streak that had stopped her from taking the rational course of action for quite some time now, telling the truth is not an option.

_The truth is I killed someone today. _Or yesterday, maybe. She’s still a little fuzzy on her sense of time. She can’t exactly call for the police and let them stumble onto the fact that she chopped a man to bits with an axe. It hits her then, that she can’t very well sit and wait for the police to come to her either. What if the hospital has already called them? A gunshot wound isn’t exactly a casual everyday injury. She can’t even play it off as an accidental or self-inflicted wound. You can’t shoot yourself in the back from ten meters.

The second of contemplation has turned into half a minute, and Eve realizes that the nurse is looking at her with concern and words are still coming out of his mouth. English words. She focuses and she starts to perceive coherent sentences again. “Are you alright, Signora? You also have a blow to the head… you may have a concussion. Is there any family we can call? A husband or a friend?”

_Husband. Nope. Very bad._

“No family. And my head hurts. Can you get me some water?”

The nurse seems reluctant to leave without answers to his other questions, but he nods and exits the room. As soon as he does, Eve musters all of her strength and uses her arms to raise herself up into a sitting position. Her head spins at first, but after a few seconds her blood pressure equalizes. Moving her legs in order to stand up seems like a very tall order, but she has to stand up, doesn’t she? What to do next after standing up is unclear, but she cannot stay in that hospital bed. If she stays in the bed, the nurse comes back and asks more questions. Even if she pretends to not remember anything, that probably results in the hospital deciding to call the police to deal with her case. Or worse, they’d call Niko.

_Focus. He said the wound is fine. Nothing major. You can surely stand up. You can surely leave._ No matter what, she cannot stay. She swings her legs over to the edge of the bed — pins and needles begin to form as the blood rushes back into her legs. Suddenly she feels like crying. _How on earth am I supposed to run when my goddamn feet are asleep?_

She wants nothing more than to curl up in a ball and call for _Aiuto_ again and tell the nurse the entire truth, from the beginning all the way back when a passing woman in a restroom told her to wear her hair down, all the way through until bang, fade to black. She wants to call the police and have them catch the bad guy and go home and have Niko cook her shepherd’s pie and tuck her into bed.

_But you can’t have any of that. You killed someone today. Or maybe yesterday._

She shifts her weight onto her still-tingly legs and tears the IV out of her arm. _No one will come and take care of me now. I am a killer. People don’t take care of killers, they try to catch them and lock them up. This must be how Villanelle feels all the time,_ she realizes. Only no, that can’t be right. Villanelle wouldn’t be afraid. _I’m terror poured into a person shaped mold right now, but fear isn’t in her emotional vocabulary. _

Quit wasting time empathizing and take some action, Eve chides herself. Let’s say she wasn’t scared but had similarly few options. What is the most ruthlessly efficient way out of this little predicament? _What would Villanelle do?_

Eve shuffles out into the hallway on partially-awakened feet and has just enough cogency to duck into the first closet she sees. She peers through the tiny crack between the door and its frame just in time to see the nurse returning with a glass of water for her. _He’s about to see that I’m not there. He’s about to sound some kind of alarm, probably._ And sure enough, she sees him rapidly exit the room and go back the way he came – to call for reinforcements? As soon as he’s turned a corner, she flees the closet and starts hobbling down the hall in the other direction as fast as her bare, weak legs will let her.

The halls are mostly quiet – whether it’s three or six, it must be AM. This is good, because there will be fewer people to spot her. But this is also bad, because once they start looking for her it will be quite easy to find her.

Eve wishes she had some cunning escape route or brilliant plan to distract the staff with guile and sneak out in plain sight. Villanelle would. But Eve has only the _flight_ half of her fight-or-flight response to guide her, and she’s clad in a hospital gown that is flapping a lot more than she’d like as she runs. The best plan she can think of – the _only_ plan she can think of – is to make a mad dash for a staircase and look for the first emergency exit she can find. Truly brilliant. No wonder they’d wanted her for MI6.

She runs because it’s her only option. And as she moves faster, her numbness gives way to a dull ache that jolts her with pain every time her feet fall. _Oh, that’s right. I was shot._ How inconvenient to have to go on the run with a fresh gunshot wound. About as inconvenient as having to go on the run with a fresh stab wound.

She’d spent a lot of time wondering about exactly what had happened to Villanelle in the interim between the friendly stabbing incident and her visit to come and kill Eve by Eve’s own request. Lots of hilarious hijinks, to be sure. But somehow Villanelle had stumbled out of her apartment, bleeding profusely, presumably found some kind of medical care while yet evading recognition and arrest, and managed to escape back to her merry life as an assassin.

_Should’ve asked her about it,_ Eve thinks. She had avoided bringing it up while they’d been working together because, well, awkward. _“Hey, I never asked, how did you end up surviving after I stabbed you?”_ But now she wishes she had — she might’ve gotten some useful tips.

_Now we’re even,_ Eve thinks. She has finally found a door in the stairwell marked: USCITA DI EMERGENZA. _I stabbed her, but I didn’t really mean to kill her. She shot me, and she didn’t really mean to kill me, because if she did, I’d be dead._

As she pushes through the door, an alarm begins clanging loudly, echoing up and down through the stairwell. If the hospital staff weren’t already close on her tail, they would be now.

Eve runs out into the early morning air, free but with nowhere to go. This is where a propensity for violence and a knack for accents might come in handy, but she’s armed only with a hospital gown that keeps flapping open in the back.

Where could be her next destination? Police, not an option, on account of she killed someone. MI6, not an option, on account of Carolyn being a double-crossing cunt, and they’d probably hand her over to the police anyway. Home, not an option – wouldn’t have been an option even before the killing part, and she sure as hell doesn’t think Niko would be charmed by her cheery anecdote of axe-murdering someone to save Villanelle.

Only one place to go, she realizes. _I have to find her._

_But first, I have to find some clothes._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thoughts? Let me know! New to this fandom and any feedback is appreciated. Especially since I think I might continue this.


	2. Tourists

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where do you find pants in Italy at six in the morning? It sounds like the setup to a joke Niko might have told, but currently it’s the predicament dominating Eve’s reality.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who read chapter 1, "Emergency Exit", and offered encouragement. I am nothing if not a slut for positive feedback, so I took what I originally wrote as a one-shot I'm turning it into a full-on spec Season 3 arc. 8 episodes, I mean, uh, chapters, coming your way. I hope people enjoy. I'm having a good time writing it so far. Please continue to let me know what you think! :)

Where do you find pants in Italy at six in the morning? It sounds like the setup to a joke Niko might have told, but currently it’s the predicament dominating Eve’s reality.

As far as Eve can tell, she’s somewhere in downtown Rome. Wandering around half-naked as the sun rises and people start to hit the city streets seems like a bad idea, so Eve decides to do her best to work away from the city center towards the less-populated areas. Her plan isn’t very sophisticated, but after about twenty minutes of walking, she is blessed with a gift from above: a laundry line full of drying clothes stretches across an alley above her head. Only problem is, it’s about eight feet up in the air.

Eve looks around her feet and as luck would have it, further down the alley outside someone’s back door she spots a handful of wooden pallets tossed outside. She retrieves them, dragging them along the uneven cobblestones and stacks them underneath the laundry line. It gives her about an eighteen inch boost, with the laundry line still a few inches tantalizingly out of reach. She stretches her body as far as she can manage, and a sudden stab of pain in her torso causes her to stumble down off her makeshift stepladder and fall to her knees on the cobblestones. Whatever drugs they gave her in the hospital must be starting to wear off.

Breathing heavily, she mounts the rickety stack of pallets one more time, bracing herself for the pain as she stretches her body to its limit again. She can’t reach the line, but she just manages to hook a finger into a dangling blouse, and as she pulls down on it with all her weight, somehow the clothespins holding it up grip strongly enough to bring the entire laundry line down along with it.

_Jackpot!_ Eve examines the haul with more excitement than she had ever shown towards nice clothes she’d bought in the past. The blouse that brought down the whole affair is stylish enough, with a floral print, so Eve holds onto it, but the only pair of bottoms she finds on the whole line is a pair of men’s gym shorts.

_I’ve committed worse sins of fashion before,_ Eve thinks to herself as she unties her hospital gown and dons the blouse and shorts. Though she’s still barefoot, at least now instead of looking like an escaped mental patient, she just looks like someone who partied too hard last night and is probably still coming down from a high. She walks at a more relaxed pace now that she’s covered her ass, literally with the gym shorts, and figuratively by putting some distance between her and the hospital. Unlikely that they’d chase her this far. _Next objective: cash._

There’s a long list of things Eve needs, including shoes, a plane ticket back to the UK, and a stiff drink, and money would be the key to each of those. Since all of the possessions she’d brought to Italy with her had been either removed from the hotel room by the MI6 cleanup crew or stripped from her at the hospital, she only has one viable way to get the cash she needs: petty theft. _Too bad I never shoplifted in high school,_ Eve thinks. Her teenage rebellion had come in the form of a series of vulgar (but witty) graffiti on school desks, which had provided a creative outlet for her at the time, but wasn’t of much use in the present.

Feeling relatively less conspicuous in her new outfit, Eve makes her way back towards the center of the city until she finds a small street lined with cafés and tiny gift shops that seems suitable to her purposes. As it’s not quite seven o’clock, not much is open, but Eve spots a café with its door propped open that looks just about right.

No one else is in the small space when Eve enters, and the barista greets her quizzically. _“Buon giorno?”_ Perhaps he’s confused by Eve’s strange attire into wondering if it really is the morning.

This is where it might have helped to have formulated a plan before entering the shop. Eve shifts her weight silently for a moment, wondering exactly how to go about separating this poor employee, who doesn’t look more than seventeen or eighteen, from the contents of the register. Distract him? Seduce him? _Kill_ him? Villanelle would probably choose “All of the above”, but Eve doesn’t feel well equipped to pursue any of those tactics with the way she’s feeling and the way she’s dressed.

_Uh-oh. I’m staring silently like a creep again._ Unlike the nurse earlier, the barista doesn’t try questioning Eve, he just stares back at her suspiciously. Probably trying to figure out if she’s homeless, high, or both.

Another customer enters, a brunette woman in a dark blazer, maybe thirty-five, looking like she’s on her way to work. She stops short next to Eve and after another few seconds, Eve realizes the woman is waiting in line to order.

“I’m not – um, _non presto – non pronto_,” Eve tries to remember the few scraps of Italian she’s picked up over the years. “Go ahead of me.”

The businesswoman understands the intent of Eve’s mangled sentence and quickly gives her order to the barista, who nods dutifully. As he makes her coffee, the barista begins conversing with the customer in Italian too rapid for Eve to understand. After a few sentences the woman laughs – it seems they have a rapport. She must be a regular. Soon the drink is ready, and the woman hands over a few Euro notes with a parting comment that makes the barista snicker. Eve thinks she caught the word “_turista”_, which she doesn’t need a dictionary to translate. The businesswoman sweeps up her coffee and exits, leaving Eve as the sole patron of the café once again.

“What do you want?” the barista asks. “Just to stand there all day?”

“I’m sorry. I forgot my wallet,” Eve stammers. Despite the delay provided by the regular, she hasn’t come up with any master plan.

“_Non c’è problema._” The barista nods towards the door. “Bianca paid for whatever you want to order. She said you look like you had a rough night.”

_That cheeky bitch._ Eve is tempted to forget the barista and go kill Bianca instead. She probably has plenty of cash in her wallet. But as much as Eve acts a big game, she knows she isn’t about to go murder a woman in the middle of the street with her bare hands. _It was challenging enough to do it with an axe._

“Actually, all I really want is some ice. Could I have a big cup of ice?” Eve hesitates. “To go, please?”

“Ice? What for?”

Eve lifts her blouse to reveal the blood-soaked bandage on her abdomen. “I was shot.”

“_Oddio_, what happened to you?” The boy recoils.

“I’ll tell you all about it if you get me some ice. I’ll even let you look under the gauze if you want.”

“_Che schifo,_ no,” the kid laughs as he turns and scoops ice into a plastic cup. Meanwhile, Eve eyes the tip jar on the counter. It’s got a couple inches of coins stacked in it, but it can’t be more than ten euro at most.

The barista places the cup of ice on the counter in front of her, and Eve asks, “Could I get a bag for this?”

“Americans always want bags for everything,” the barista chuckles as he carefully bags the cup of ice. “Are you sure you don’t want a coffee too? Or a sandwich? It’s all paid for.”

“How much did Bianca give you?”

“Fifty euro.” He leans close to Eve and adds, “She’s loaded.”

Eve raises an eyebrow at that. “Any chance I could get that in cash?”

“_Allora_… Why not. I don’t give a shit,” the kid shrugs.

“_Grazie_,” Eve replies, feeling suddenly overwhelmed with genuine gratitude for this Italian teenager. “I’m sorry for ruining your morning.”

“Ruining? You made the morning shift a lot more interesting,” the kid says as he opens the register. As he looks under the tray to grab the fifty euro note, he doesn’t see Eve swinging the tip jar at his head until it’s too late. The glass makes a clunk against his skull and he collapses to the floor.

Eve tries to climb over the counter and is stopped by a jolt of pain from her wound, so instead, cursing under her breath, she takes the long way around and hastily grabs as many bills as she can from the register as the boy lies on the ground, moaning in pain.

As she runs out the door, stuffing the cash into the bag, Eve could swear she hears the barista groan, “_Turisti_.”

  
After running what seems like an appropriate distance from the scene of the crime, Eve stops to rest in a quaint piazza. She sits down on a bench, holds the cup of ice against her bandage, and counts her haul. With the bills from the register plus the contents of the tip jar, the total comes to one hundred eighty-seven euro. Less than she’d hoped for, but workable. Most of that would have to go towards a ticket back to London, but she should have enough to afford some footwear.

She sits until the ice melts and then wanders towards larger streets until she spots a neon high heel and the words she’s looking for: _Scarpe & Scarpe_. With her budget as tight as it is, and knowing that no pair of shoes on Earth can redeem her outfit, Eve grabs a pair of yellow Crocs two sizes too large from the clearance rack. _Holy shit, these are comfortable as hell,_ she realizes as she tries them on. _Like walking on an ugly yellow cloud_. She makes a mental note to buy a pair in the correct size when she gets home.

The Crocs not only provide sweet relief from walking barefoot on the stone streets, they also perfectly complete the _oh-crap-don’t-make-eye-contact_ look Eve is rocking. She struts down the streets of Rome, extremely proud of herself: it’s not even ten in the morning and she’s checked off most of her to do list. Her stomach growls, but she’s concerned about whether or not she has enough money left to get home, so she resigns herself to hunger for the time being.

Following the directions she received from a very uncomfortable young woman outside _Scarpe & Scarpe_, Eve starts plodding along in her Crocs towards the British Embassy. Honestly, she’s less pissed about the whole getting shot thing than the fact that the whole mess has made her lose her passport. Eve hates nothing more than paperwork, and not only is she gonna have to fill out a bunch, she’s gonna have to come up with a nice, boring, believable lie about how she lost the passport that won’t raise any red flags.

By half past eleven, having successfully convinced the clerks at the embassy that her passport was at the bottom of the Tiber and she absolutely needed to be home today to see her son before he went under for brain surgery, Eve is en route to the airport with one hundred forty-three euro and a provisional passport in hand. The ticket to London only costs ninety euro, so she treats herself to lunch and a beer while she waits for her flight, and the greasy egg sandwich from the airport cafe is the most delicious meal she’s ever had.

Although she’s tired, Eve doesn’t try to sleep on the flight; she doesn’t want to be awoken again in a few hours. She’d rather dive into her bed as soon as she gets home and sleep for days. But then the reality of her situation sinks in. _I can go back to London, but I can’t go home_. This isn’t like the other times, when she and Niko fought about her job, or about Villanelle, and she just had to wait it out, or find a way to make it up to him. Her life has reached an irrevocable inflection point: she can never go home again.

Being away from home had never bothered her before, in fact, she’d quite dreaded the moments she was at home with Niko for the past several months. Still, knowing that chapter of her life is completely barred from her is upsetting, and it’s enough to keep her preoccupied for the rest of the flight, distracting her from her original intention of formulating a convincing plan to track down Villanelle.

  
When the plane touches down in London, Eve wanders aimlessly out of the airport like a zombie. It’s fitting that she looks like a homeless person, because she is homeless now. With her legs weighing like lead and her wound throbbing painfully with each heartbeat, Eve slowly drags herself across London to the only place she can think of to go.

Eve presses the buzzer at the door to the apartment building and waits. She might fall asleep on the stoop before she gets an answer. Then, a crackle of static and a familiar voice.

“I’m not expecting anyone, so go on and take your nutrition powder or your religious books or whatever you’re selling on to the next flat, thanks.”

Eve smiles and presses the intercom button. “Hi Elena, it’s Eve. Can I sleep on your couch?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Does anyone know if they actually sell Crocs in Italy? I was not able to confirm this via the internet, but I also strongly believe Eve needs a pair of Crocs in her life.


	3. Single Life

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eve takes refuge with an old friend and begins the hunt for Villanelle.

As soon as Eve gets up to the third floor, Elena has already flung the door open to pull her into a warm hug. “Oh, I missed you! I just couldn’t stomach working that case that might get me killed, but my new job is so boring I might just kill myself.” She releases Eve and looks her up and down, her gaze locking onto Eve’s yellow Crocs. “Really?”

“Don’t knock ‘em ’til you try em,” Eve retorts as she steps into Elena’s flat. It’s not overly large, but cozy, outfitted with a mix of fun and functional decorations. A few well-tended houseplants are scattered about the room and a book or magazine rests on every surface.

“I know it’s probably rude to ask since clearly you’re going through something awful, but what exactly is the awful thing you’re going through that brings you here to my flat wearing those shoes?”

“Niko and I are separated. For good. I think,” Eve chooses her words carefully.

“I’m sorry,” Elena says reflexively. “But you know what? I’m really not. I never wanted to say anything before but you didn’t seem too happy being married.”

“Not all the time,” Eve admits.

“Seemed like you’d rather be at work than at home. So maybe it’s for the best.” Elena invites Eve over to her small kitchen table and begins making a pot of tea.

“Speaking of work, I’m happy to see you, but before you get all cozy here, I need to know. Is anyone on their way to kill you right now?”

“Fair question. But no.”

“Really? Forgive me for being cautious here Eve, but a lot of people have wanted you dead lately and I don’t want any of them showing up at my door.”

“Definitely not.” Eve feels a slight twinge of guilt as she says this, even though it’s true. _Most likely._ If Villanelle cared about killing her, she’d be dead already. Carolyn had double crossed her, it’s true, but seemed to have no intention of killing her. While the rest of the Twelve might want her dead since she’d killed Raymond, they probably didn’t even know it was her — finding his corpse there, it’d be easy to assume that Villanelle had taken care of him herself._ Because she could have. She had the gun._ Eve shakes that thought off before she spirals down a depressive rabbit hole.

“In that case, let’s have a proper slumber party,” Elena says cheerily.

After the tea, Elena warms up some frozen pizzas and popcorn. “I know it’s not like a home-cooked meal made by your husband, but you’re on the single life now so you’ll have to get used to it,” Elena teases. “Seriously. How are you doing?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I guess it was inevitable. Like you said, our marriage hadn’t been working for a while.”

“Since we started working for Carolyn.”

“No, longer than that.” Eve knows there’s truth to what she’s saying, but at the same time she wonders: if not for the job causing tension between them – if she hadn’t met Villanelle – would she still be with Niko? Would she be home right now, eating shepherd’s pie, in her own clothes, instead of on the run, eating frozen pizza and wearing a Roman stranger’s gym shorts? “But work did… complicate things.”

“You mean _she_ complicated things?”

Eve puts her pizza down and takes a big swig of tea. “Do you have anything stronger?”

Elena answers that by grabbing a bottle of wine from her cabinet and placing it down on the table, pouring Eve a generous glass.

Eve takes a large swig of wine. “A lot has happened since you quit.”

“There’s nothing good on TV lately. I could listen to a story.”

  
  
Eve gives Elena a very judiciously edited version of events. The Ghost, Aaron Peel, even the way MI6 used Villanelle as an inside agent all get to stay, but she boldly censors the multiple stabbings and shootings exchanged between her and Villanelle. She still gives Elena the juicy twist ending – that Carolyn left Eve out to dry and blamed the whole mess on her.

“I wish I could say I was surprised that Carolyn pulled that stunt,” Elena mutters once Eve is done. “But honestly, I’m just glad I got out when I did.”

“You were the smartest one of us,” Eve replies, swishing around the last drop in her empty wine glass.

“And Villanelle?”

Eve stiffens a little bit at hearing Villanelle’s name coming out of someone else’s mouth. “She’s gone. Disappeared after killing Peel.” Eve feels like she doesn’t sound convincing enough, so she adds, “Good riddance.”

“Carolyn though… I got a bad vibe, but I didn’t think she’d turn on you. You were always her favorite. You really are in deep shit now,” Elena chuckles, bringing the used dishes from the table to the sink. “I’ll get some sheets for the pull-out. We can figure out the rest in the morning.”

By the time Elena returns with sheets, Eve is already sound asleep on the couch.

  
It’s Eve’s first non-drug-assisted sleep since getting shot and, despite her exhaustion, she doesn’t sleep well. Every few hours the pain wakes her up, and she has to toss and turn until she falls back asleep. In her dreams she relives her assault of the Italian teen in the coffee shop at least four times. By the third time, in that about-to-wake-up-knowing-it’s-a-dream-moment, she wonders: _Really? Again?_

  
When Eve wakes up for the fourth or fifth time she finally sees light coming in through the windows, so she decides to try rising from the couch. Her wound feels even worse after a night of sleeping on her side; she’ll have to do something about that soon. She finds a note from Elena on the kitchen table, weighed down by a spare key: _Gone to work. Please don’t get yourself killed while I’m out._

In the bathroom, she turns on the shower, strips off her ridiculous stolen outfit, and gingerly removes the bandage from her wound for the first time. It stings as she peels it off, and she twists around to examine the damage in the mirror. It’s a small hole, maybe a centimeter across, but it looks angry and red and covered in pus. Eve opens Elena’s medicine cabinet and finds some rubbing alcohol and cotton pads. She braces herself, but still isn’t prepared for how badly it stings when she dabs the wound with alcohol, letting out a loud scream despite herself. _Hope the neighbors are already awake._

It’s hard to shower when it feels like a new bullet entering her every time water hits the wound, but she manages to clean herself up somewhat and covers the hole once again with some gauze from the medicine cabinet. She dresses herself in a more normal outfit (hoping Elena won’t mind if she borrows some clothes) and examines herself in the mirror again. She looks exceedingly regular. No sign of the trauma she’s endured in the past two days. She wouldn’t say no to some Vicodin, but to an outside observer she may as well be the Eve Polastri of a few months ago. The Eve Polastri that still had her job, her husband, and her sanity.

With such an ordinary look about her, Eve is prepared to do what she hates most: errands. Of course she would much prefer to immediately start putting together a bulletin board or two filled with theories of where Villanelle could have fled to, but there are a few more practicalities to take care of first.

Step one is going down to get a proper replacement passport. Eve has no doubts that the quest to find Villanelle would take her across several countries and possibly continents as well. Step zero is the part she dreads even more.

She breaks into her house by jimmying open the living room window from the outside. It’s a familiar exploit for Eve, one she’d used on multiple other occasions when she’d forgotten her keys in the middle of the day and not wanted to bother Niko at work. She had never told him about it because if he’d known, he would’ve wanted to fix it. _“What it someone dangerous breaks into our house?”_ he’d have said. Eve had felt slightly vindicated in her secrecy when it was later shown that dangerous people tended to use the front door.

As she walks through the house to the bedroom, it briefly occurs to her that she could stay here rather than imposing on Elena – Niko is probably still staying at Gemma’s, isn’t he? He never actually told her to leave the house; he volunteered to leave himself. But even still, he might come by sometime to pick things up, and Eve doesn’t want to encounter him again, no matter how briefly. Even just being in the house full of his things makes her uncomfortable, surrounded on all sides by reminders of how badly she’d treated him.

_I shouldn’t care about that,_ she tells herself. _I killed someone. Surely being a bad wife ranks much farther down the list of moral failings._ Nonetheless it bothers her, so she resolves to get what she needs as quickly as possible and then leave the house for good.

In her bedroom, she grabs a suitcase (the same one Villanelle had stolen from her in Berlin) and fills it with clothes, not paying much attention to what she packs, but grabbing enough so that she won’t have to scavenge from laundry lines or borrow from Elena again. She also grabs her laptop, her secret stash of rainy-day cash, and a few other effects that might prove useful, then leaves her house for what she hopes would be the last time. She expects to feel sad as she shuts the door behind her, but it’s more of a relief.

After getting her new passport (sliding the clerk a hefty sum to circumvent the four-to-six week waiting period), she picks herself up a new prepaid phone as well as two grocery bags full of sugar and junk food. Fuel for her research.

She holes up in Elena’s flat for the rest of the day, starting her research in the most obvious place, with an internet search for “murder Rome”. The first page of results is dominated by the news of Aaron Peel’s murder, which Eve should have seen coming. _That was only two days ago,_ she remembers. The tech world must be reeling.

She valiantly combs through the results looking for any other homicides in Rome since then, but finds nothing that screams “Villanelle”. Eve hadn’t really been expecting to find her in Rome, anyway – it just seemed the logical place to start. So when Villanelle left after shooting Eve, where did she go?

Eve makes the mistake of trying to slip into Villanelle’s mind the moment after the shot, which, rather than giving her anything useful to go on, plagues her with questions like: _did she regret it? Did she make sure I was alive? Did she bring me to the hospital? What did she tell them? How long did she stay? Or… did she leave me there bleeding?_

Eve pushes those thoughts away and proceeds to the next logical step to check. She searches for “Paris murder” and limits the results to the past two days. If Villanelle left Rome, she might have gone back to her old flat. She sure liked Paris the first time. But there’s only one report of a homicide in Paris in the past two days – a domestic violence case. Clearly not Villanelle’s doing.

Maybe she went back to Amsterdam. That’s where she was with Konstantin; she sent Eve that postcard. But that search also turns up nothing.

_London? Could she have come here, to wait for me?_ The search finds no results.

Eve spends several hours combing the news from every major European city and finds no murders that seem like Villanelle’s style. _Could I be missing something? Is she trying to fly under the radar?_ But Eve has always been able to recognize Vilanelle’s work instinctively, and her instincts have never been wrong before.  
The final search she can bring herself to make is: “murder Alaska”. But as she expected, nothing. Eve is ashamed to feel a bit relieved that Villanelle didn’t go on to Alaska without her. _It means she only wanted to go with me._

The logical conclusion – not that Eve has been prone to making those in the past – is that Villanelle simply hasn’t killed anyone in the past two days. Ordinarily, this would be good news. But Eve finds it frustrating. It isn’t like Villanelle to go very long without seeking attention, without leaving a trail. At the heart of her frustration is the more cutting conclusion: _for the first time since we’ve met, she doesn’t **want** me to find her._

Eve angrily tears apart an empty bag of crisps she finished as she was working, causing crumbs to fly all over Elena’s couch. Maybe she shouldn’t have expected it to be so easy, but Eve had really believed that Villanelle would’ve left a message, a clue – a gift of some sort for her. A gesture that said, _“Sorry Baby, I feel positively dreadful about shooting you, come play again.”_

But instead, no murders, no lipsticks, no postcards – nothing.

_When I find her, I’ll have a gift for her,_ Eve thinks. _Something unforgettable._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading! I know, like Eve, you're probably wondering how long it's gonna be before she finds Villanelle. And the answer is: a little bit longer. V couldn't make it too easy for Eve, now could she? ;)
> 
> Please let me know what you think! I'm working a few chapters ahead... really fun stuff to come... still plotting out the big finale.


	4. Bubbles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With a little lying to friends and charity from enemies, Eve uncovers an essential clue to Villanelle's location.

Eve hasn’t lost her sense of time this badly since she was a teenager on those one or two weeks of summer break when her parents would allow her to have downtime rather than working or taking classes. She remains glued to Elena’s couch, constantly refreshing news sites for information about any new homicides, expanding her search further and further, measuring time in bottles of Tylenol she’s consumed. She knows she isn’t getting anywhere, but she persists out of stubbornness. She’s always been able to track down Villanelle by reports of her murderous handiwork before, so why shouldn’t it work now? Even if Villanelle is taking a pause on killing, it can’t last forever. She doesn’t have the self control for that. It’s only a matter of time until she strikes somewhere, and then Eve would come for her.

Yet days go by, and no dead bodies bearing Villanelle’s signature style in the news, nor do any tasteful or dangerous gifts appear at the doorstep. Without interactions with Villanelle to serve as marking points, time stretches into one meaningless blob for Eve. Has it really been almost a week since the shot? Although her body physically recognizes the passage of time with her wound gradually starting to close, as far as Eve’s mind is concerned, the experience couldn’t have been more than a few hours ago.

Eve’s gone through one and a half bottles of Tylenol when Elena finally switches from cheerily asking if there’s anything else she can do to help Eve get back on her feet to point blank asking when Eve will find her own place to stay.

“It’s not that I don’t like your company,” Elena reassures her. “It’s just that I might like to sit on my own couch at some point.”

“That’s understandable,” Eve murmurs, her eyes still trained on the Russian news site open on her laptop.

“Funny how I feel like you’re not really listening to me.”

Eve pulls herself out of her research and closes the laptop. “I’m sorry. I’m being an ass. I’m just going through a really tough time right now.”

“I know, with your marriage ending, and losing your job.”

“Not just losing my job. Carolyn ended my whole _career_. She took away any chance I had of going back to a somewhat normal life.”

“Right, and that sucks. Which is why you’re welcome to stay as long as you need, but it just seems to me like you’re stuck in a rut and you’re not really healing.” Elena sits down on the couch beside Eve, moving aside some empty crisp packets. “I think if you take some steps forward, like looking for a job, or a flat, or even going outside, you’ll start to feel like yourself again.”

“I’d love to, but it’s not that easy. Where am I supposed to find a job now?” Eve wonders. “I mean, I used to know how to find a job. I’ve checked all the obvious places. But my old way of finding a job just isn’t working, and the job could be anywhere in the world by now.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but you can try letting someone else in.” Elena puts a hand on Eve’s shoulder. “I know you’re a smart, independent woman, but it’s okay to ask for help on occasion.”

“That’s not a bad idea.” Eve opens her laptop again, beginning to form a plan.

After downloading all of her contacts from her laptop onto her new phone, Eve braces herself for the call she’s about to make. It goes to voicemail – it makes sense that he wouldn’t recognize the new number – so she leaves a message. “Hi Kenny. It’s me. I need to talk. Call me back.” That’ll do for now, since it’d be better to have the full discussion in person.

She leaves Kenny seven similar messages over the next day, but he never calls back. Eve is beginning to believe Kenny is avoiding her for some reason. Has Carolyn forbidden him to speak to her? Or did Kenny decide all on his own that he didn’t want to deal with Eve anymore? _Oh my god, does he know I’m a murderer?_ No, Eve reassures herself, there’s no way – the team had probably found out that Raymond was dead, but there was no reason for them to believe Eve had killed him rather than Villanelle. 

No matter what, Eve needed to find a way to speak with Kenny in person.

  
“Please, Elena, it’s just a teeny tiny favor,” Eve pleads.

“I don’t think it’s a good idea, Eve, not after what went down with you and Carolyn,” Elena replies, washing dishes.

“One little call. That’s all I need. Just call Kenny and ask him to meet you. Then I’ll go and I’ll speak with him for a few minutes.”

“I don’t want to lie to him,” Elena insists. “If he’s not answering your calls, there’s probably a good reason.”

“Or maybe Carolyn is just forbidding him to help me,” Eve suggests.

“Or maybe he’s trying to protect you because he knows Carolyn will come after you again if she finds out you’re badgering her son,” Elena counters.

“Please, Elena. A face to face conversation with him, that’s all I need. I haven’t seen him since before–” Eve stops herself. “Once I talk to him, I’ll get out of your hair. Look, I’m already packed.” Eve points to her suitcase standing next to the coffee table.

“I really hope I don’t regret this,” Elena says as she gets out her phone.

Eve pulls her suitcase along behind her as she heads to the bar where Elena had told Kenny to meet. When she walks up, Kenny is already there, picking at the label on his beer nervously. _Poor boy._ Eve feels a twinge of guilt for getting Kenny’s hopes up, but he could have saved himself the disappointment by returning her damn calls.

“Kenny.” Eve greets him. As soon as Kenny sees her, his anxiousness evaporates into anger.

“Eve, what the hell are you doing?”

“You wouldn’t return my calls.”

“We can’t be talking. You need to get out of here. I need to get out of here.” Kenny starts to leave, but Eve steps in front of him.

“Please, Kenny. Five minutes. I just want to talk to you.”

“I can’t.”

“I need your help. Don’t you know what your mother did to me?”

“Yeah, I know she pulled out the rug from under you, but–”

“Not that.” Eve feels desperation building, and the lie comes to her quickly. She lifts up her sweater and reveals her bandaged torso. “Did you know how she tried to have me killed?”

Kenny’s face goes white. “She wouldn’t.”

“She did, Kenny.” Eve replaces her shirt. “It didn’t take, but I bet she’ll try to finish the job soon, that’s why I need your help.”

“I can’t believe it,” Kenny shakes his head. “She wouldn’t have stooped that low.”

“But you also can’t say for sure that she didn’t.”

“I can’t,” Kenny is shell-shocked. “I can’t…”

“Kenny. Focus. I need you to tell me where Konstantin and his family are now.”

“What?”

“Konstantin. I need to find him.”

“Why?”

“It’s better if you don’t know,” Eve answers. “I need to find him to save my ass. That’s all.”

“I can’t help you, Eve. This isn’t like before, when we’d go behind her back together. I can’t do that anymore.”

“Please, Kenny. One address. Then I’ll disappear forever.”

Kenny hesitates, overloaded with indecision. Eve decides to press further. “Do you want me to die? Do you want to be on the cleanup crew when they’re cleaning up my body?”

“No, Eve, I don’t want you to die!” Kenny explodes. He punches a fist down onto the bar, his knuckles white. “I’ll text you the address. But this has to be the last time. You can’t call me asking for something else tomorrow. This has to be it.”

“It is. I wish it wasn’t, but it is.”

Kenny’s entire body relaxes slightly. “Goodbye, Eve.”

“Goodbye, Kenny.”

Eve is genuinely sad to have lost Kenny. The prospect of never seeing him again hits her harder than never seeing Niko again. At least when she was with Kenny, she didn’t constantly feel like she was failing to live up to the standard she had agreed to when she said “I do”. Kenny was a friend, a very good friend at that, and Eve had bid him farewell by lying to him.

_Maybe it was a lie,_ she rationalizes, _but it’s Carolyn’s fault that it was a believable lie. If she wasn’t such a backstabbing, manipulative piece of shit, maybe her own son wouldn’t have so easily accepted the idea that she’d casually order my death._

A few minutes later, Kenny makes good on his promise and texts the address, nothing more. No tearful goodbye message. A clean break. Eve hails a cab and makes her way to the new Vasiliev family home.

It’s about a forty minute drive from London, so Eve has some time to kill. She plays with her phone, scrolling through the contacts. When she downloaded her contacts from her laptop to the new phone, it included one that she’d been hesitant to consider using: _V_. She’d brushed it off at first because Villanelle probably didn’t even still have the phone MI6 had given her. She’d probably ditched it so Eve couldn’t track her, or more likely, knowing Villanelle, carelessly lost it in the middle of some adventure. But what if she hadn’t?

Eve hits “new message” and starts typing. _How are you?_ No, stupid. Delete. _Kill anyone lately?_ Nope. Delete. _You think you’re being sneaky, but I’ll find you._ Creepy, delete. What on earth do you text to someone who shot you and disappeared? Eve types out a few more lame messages before putting the phone away. It’s therapeutic to imagine sending them, but it’s better if Villanelle doesn’t know Eve’s coming. _I want her to be surprised._

The cab unloads her in front of a rather modest country house with a short stone path up to the door. Eve rings the doorbell, suddenly a bit nervous about how this will pan out. Her plan had only gone so far as, “Get Kenny to help her find Konstantin, who would help her find Villanelle.” The method to convince Kenny had come to her on the spot, but Konstantin would not be so easily manipulated. She suddenly wishes she’d brought a weapon.

The door swings open and Konstantin’s daughter, Irina, stands in front of Eve.

“Hi. Is your dad home?” Eve asks sweetly.

“Papa! The woman who can’t throw for shit is here to see you!”

Eve hears footsteps and Konstantin soon appears by the door. “Eve Polastri.”

“Happy to see me?”

“No. Come in.”

  
  
Konstantin leads her to a small room with a desk and a couple of chairs, away from the rest of the family. “Whiskey?” he asks as he pours himself a glass.

“Please.” Eve doesn’t usually drink whiskey, but perhaps it will help lubricate this difficult conversation.

“Let me guess why you are here. You are no longer with MI6, I gather.”

“No.”

“Carolyn is a dangerous woman,” Konstantin says. “But I can never seem to get myself away from dangerous women.”

“That’s the life,” Eve jokes.

“So you’re here about Villanelle, then.”

“Yes.”

“The last time I saw her, she told me she was running away with you.”

“She told me that too,” Eve replies. “So it caught me a little off guard when she shot me.”

Konstantin lets out a hearty laugh. “Didn’t I warn you about that?”

“She said she loved me.”

“Villanelle says a lot of things she doesn’t mean.”

“So you don’t think she does? Love me?”

“I don’t think she loves,” Konstantin replies. “Not the way you or I do. Maybe that word means something different to her.”

“She shot me. But she didn’t kill me.”

“You are one of the lucky few.”

“Doesn’t that mean… doesn’t that _prove_ that she wants me alive?”

“She shot me too, remember?” Konstantin pats the spot on his chest where Eve remembers seeing the bullet enter him in that tea room in Russia. “She told me afterwards that she missed on purpose. But you were there. Did she look like she was using mercy?”

Eve remembers the look on Villanelle’s face perfectly. Reluctance at first, but once the decision had been made and the trigger pulled, her eyes had gone cold and ruthless.

“I need to find her. I need to know for sure.”

“So find her.”

“I tried. She hasn’t been leaving her usual trail of bodies.”

“That’s good.”

“No, it’s inconvenient.” Eve hears herself like a third-party observer for a moment. Did she really just call a lack of murder _inconvenient?_ “You were her handler. You must have some other way of tracking her down, right?”

“I have put those days behind me. I’m focusing on my family now,” Konstantin replies.

“Give me anything. I’m working with nothing. No evidence. Not even a peep. It’s not like her.”

“Have you considered that she could be dead?” Konstantin offers.

“Dead?” Eve feels slightly dizzy at the thought. “She’s not dead.”

“You still think of her as invincible,” Konstantin says, and is that a hint of pity in his voice? “You watch her kill, you watch her fight without fear, and you always see her win. But she is not immortal. She is fearless, but it makes her careless. So many times she almost got herself killed. On missions. Walking down the street. Once, I pulled her out of the path of a bus, and she laughed at me for ‘yelping like a schoolgirl’.” Konstantin smiles at the memory. “As much trouble as she gets herself into, I think the way she is going to go is choking. She eats too fast.”

_Villanelle, choking to death?_ Everything about it seemed wrong to Eve, but she had no counterargument.

“Even if she is dead,”– it speeds up Eve’s heartrate just to mention that possibility – “then there’s a body, and I need to find it. I need to find her.”

“You’re desperate.”

“I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”

“You have destroyed everything in your life for her.”

“Yes.” There’s no point in denying it.

“Because you still believe she can change.”

Eve is a bit surprised by this. “What do you mean?”

“You are entranced by her. You love that she is different. But you also know your life is not compatible with hers. When you are together, you’re like Coca-Cola, and she is like… what’s the name of that candy? The little white ones?”

“Mentos?” Eve supplies.

“You are Coca-Cola and she is Mentos,” Konstantin continues. “The two of you together: big reaction. Explosion. It’s exciting. But it destroys you.”

“That may be, but…” Eve begins to argue, but doesn’t have much to go on.

“You are a smart woman. You understand the incompatibility. But you are also foolish, because you still have that bit of hope that she will change. You hope that she’ll become a person who still makes bubbles for you, but doesn’t explode. That she will be exciting, but stable. That she will be able to say she loves you and mean it. But this will never happen.”

“You can’t know that,” Eve protests. “She’s surprised you before.”

“She surprised me by being who she is, because I used to hope like you do,” Konstantin says, a hint of sadness creeping into his voice. “I expected her to change. To grow. Like my daughter. She’s an annoying little thing, but she’s growing. Never the same one day to the next. I took care of Villanelle for three years, and she never grew a bit.”

“You know kids do eventually stop getting taller, right?”

Konstantin ignores Eve’s snide remark and continues. “It never made sense to me, until I accepted that it’s impossible for her. The only change that is ever going to happen to Villanelle is the change from life to death.”

Eve struggles to come up with a compelling counter-argument while Konstantin finishes his whiskey. She fails, so she asks plainly one more time: “Can you help me find her or not?”

“I’ll help you, Eve Polastri, even though it will be bad for you.” Konstantin rises, and opens the drawer of his desk, retrieving his phone. “But maybe you can distract her and keep her from bothering me.”

Konstantin hands Eve the phone, showing a text conversation with Villanelle. _This motherfucker has been in contact with her the whole time?_ Eve is furious, but at the same time filled with euphoria at the confirmation that Villanelle is alive, at least.

She looks through the text chain. It’s completely one-sided: Villanelle has been sending Konstantin a few messages a day for the past week, but he has never responded. Eve scrolls back to the beginning and reads each one hungrily.

_“Are you bored of your family yet?”_

_“I got a new job. Are you proud of me?”_

_“I’m planning your next birthday party…”_

_“Irina must be driving you crazy.”_

These are followed by many more messages in the same vein, little everyday thoughts that could have come to Villanelle at any moment and offered no insight to her current situation other than the fact that she is alive and missing Konstantin. None contain even the slightest allusion to Eve, which sparks her jealousy. Jealousy is soon replaced by satisfaction when Eve reaches the end and the most recent message provides her exactly the clue she needs.

It’s a photo of a painting – a pretty nondescript portrait by all accounts – depicting a bearded man in a dark cloak. Along with the photo, Villanelle had sent: _“I pass this museum on my way to work. You would love it. It’s so boring. This one reminded me of you.”_ She isn’t wrong, Eve thinks; the man in the portrait does bear a passing resemblance to Konstantin, though it isn’t exactly uncanny.

Heart racing, Eve copies the image and does a reverse image search. She prays it’s a famous enough painting to get some hits. Luckily, the search returns ample results. The painting is called _St. Dominic_, painted by Titian circa 1565. _Currently housed in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, Italy._

“Son of a bitch.” Eve throws the phone down on the desk.

Konstantin laughs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The reunion is nigh. :) Big things coming up. Starting with this chapter, all of the rest have turned out longer than I initially planned. In the most fun way. 
> 
> Please let me know what you think of this chapter! And please come say hi on tumblr. I have like hardly any Killing Eve followers. https://imunbreakabledude.tumblr.com/


	5. Non Voglio Più Rivederti

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With Konstantin's help, Eve learns Villanelle's location and prepares for their reunion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's the one you've all been waiting for... and the chapter title is a tribute to [my favorite song from the Killing Eve soundtrack.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RylPcVQa_h4) Enjoy!

After all the time Eve had spent searching fruitlessly, wondering what obscure corner of the earth Villanelle had fled to, she was in the same city Eve had left her in. Eve kicks over a wastebasket, wishing it was Villanelle’s stupid little head.

“Hey. There’s no need for that.” Konstantin stoops to right the wastebasket, tossing in the scraps of trash that had fallen out.

“She had me thinking she disappeared. _You_ had me thinking she was dead! And she didn’t even have the decency to pick a new goddamn city!” Eve wants to kick something else, but restrains herself, instead grabbing her glass of whiskey off the desk and drains the rest of it.

Konstantin laughs. “You want her new address?”

“You have her _address_?”

“She’s been sending me perfume. God knows why.”

“Maybe because you stink.” Eve wishes she could’ve come up with a more clever comeback, but she’s fuming. “Why’d you waste twenty minutes jerking me around?”

“I thought you liked playing detective.”

“You’re an asshole. Villanelle has been rubbing off on you.”

“I have to get my kicks somewhere. I’ll get you the box,” Konstantin leaves Eve, still chuckling as he goes.

Eve knows she should be glad for this turn of events, as it certainly would bring her to her destination a lot more quickly than she had expected, but she’s livid that Villanelle had been begging Konstantin for attention while sending nothing whatsoever in Eve’s direction. Not even the tiniest scrap to show that she still cared. 

Then it hits Eve: _I’m furious right now. She did absolutely nothing, and here I am, more worked up than ever. She didn’t do anything for me, but she did **nothing** for me._

Eve considers how must restraint it must be taking Villanelle to have not killed anyone (at least, not in any fun way) for over a week now. _All that, just to make me work for her. She’s good._

Eve’s just starting to get a little hot and bothered at that thought when Konstantin returns. He hands Eve an opened cardboard box which holds another fancy gold and black striped box which Eve opens to find a few small bottles of perfume on a cushion of tissue paper. No “La Villanelle”, but an assortment of Italian fragrances. Eve doesn’t know enough about perfume to recognize any of them, but they look very expensive, which figures; Villanelle has always had expensive taste.

“Take them if you want,” Konstantin offers. “I don’t need my wife to smell like her.”

Eve turns over the package and examines the return address. “Are you sure this is where she’s staying?”

“No. But it’s the best you’re going to get.”

“Back to Italy, then,” Eve mutters. “_Ciao_.”

“Take care, Eve. Keep her busy. Make sure she chews her food!”

Anticipation bubbles up inside Eve as she heads to the airport and books the very next flight to Rome. She wonders if she’s ahead or behind of schedule in Villanelle’s mind. Surely she expects that Eve will find her eventually, but will Eve still be able to surprise her with her swiftness? Or will Villanelle greet her in that dry tone, “_What took you so long_?”

She’s feeling a lot of things – anxiety over how to make her entrance, jealousy that Villanelle had been showering Konstantin with affection, but mostly an overwhelming sense that everything is going to be okay. Maybe she’d trashed everything else in her life, but at least the one thing that was at stake – the one reason she’d thrown it all away – wasn’t lost to her.

Eve has never been one to cut her losses. Many teachers throughout her life had chastised her for being too stubborn, too “defiant”, unwilling to concedede on even a meaningless debate in class once she had dug her heels in. It was rare for her to walk away from anything, no matter how little was at stake. _But then, didn’t you walk away from her a week ago?_ _You turned and she shot you in the back._ Doubt plays at the back of Eve’s mind for a moment. Her bullet wound aches and it brings her back to the moment right before the bullet entered her, when she’d been ready to walk away from Villanelle. 

If she walked away then, why was she crawling back now? Suddenly all of Eve’s stubbornness shifts inside her, like cargo sliding within a pitching ship on the waves, wanting to ally itself with her previous position. _I got shot for this, and now I’m going right back to her? How pathetic am I?_

But even all of Eve’s desire to be retroactively right in that moment cannot truly change her course. She is suddenly reminded of the few occasions when her work with MI5 had brought her in contact with addicts. The shiftiness, the constant movement, the way they’d gradually lose their composure more and more the longer they went without a fix. _I can’t help myself,_ Eve admits._ I’m a junkie. And right now, I’m in withdrawal. No wonder I can’t think straight._

Despite any ideas Eve may have had of resisting, she’s powerless to her baser urges, and resolves herself to: _maybe after I see her one more time, I’ll be able to think more clearly._

She knows it’s bullshit.

Eve gets a cab outside the airport and gives the driver the return address from the perfume package. When the cab drops her off in front of an unassuming apartment building, Eve takes a quick look up and down the street, then walks a few hundred meters in each direction, examining her surroundings. She had definitely seen that _“Forza Giallorossi!”_ sign in one of the apartment windows before. Eve had walked down this exact street after escaping the hospital a week ago. She was sure of it.

_She didn’t even move a mile._ Eve didn’t think she could get more pissed off, but she does. Especially at the image that pops into her head of Villanelle peering out a window, probably jerking off, while watching Eve run down the street in her hospital gown like a crazed animal. Well, it doesn’t matter now. _I’ll give her something to jerk off about. _

Eve enters the apartment building and runs up the stairs, ignoring the twinge from her wound as she takes the steps two at a time. She approaches the door of Apartment 3B, as was written on the package, and realizes there’s at least a fifty percent chance that Villanelle had written the wrong apartment number on the package just to get Eve to bust open some stranger’s door. Only one way to find out, though.

Eve knocks twice. Why twice, she doesn’t know, but it seems like the right amount. A few seconds pass. She can’t breathe. Then, from inside: _"È aperta."_

Even through the Italian accent, Eve recognizes that voice, and her insides turn to jelly. She’s spent every waking hour since the shot imagining the moment when she’d confront Villanelle. She had expected many more roadblocks before it finally happened, but here it was, and she’s utterly unprepared. She stands frozen outside the door, until another yell issues from inside: “_Sei sordo, vecchietto? Entra!"_

Eve might not speak Italian, but she gets the message from the tone: _come in_ (also, she thinks there was an insult somewhere in there).

Eve takes a deep breath, opens the door, and has a stroke in the next moment, or at least that seems like the only explanation for the confusing sight that her eyes deliver to her brain.

Inside the rather small and dingy apartment, there’s a couch, and a TV, and there’s Villanelle. Sitting on the couch, watching TV, wearing… _sweatpants_? Why on earth is Villanelle wearing sweatpants without a gun to her head? No, scratch that: even with someone pointing a gun to her head, Villanelle would surely rather kill the hypothetical bad-fashion assailant rather than don sweatpants. 

That’s not all: this mysterious imposter who looks just like Villanelle is not only dressed for comfort rather than fashion, she’s holding scissors and cutting what appear to be coupons while she watches an Italian made-for-TV movie.

_Oh,_ Eve rationalizes. _She did kill me. She shot me and I died, and this is what some strange god had planned for me in the afterlife. Just a whole lot of confusion and torment. It figures I’m in Hell; I wasn’t a very good person._

Eve’s loopy introspection is cut short when Villanelle looks up and takes in her visitor. “You’re not Giacomo.” She pauses, staring at Eve for a few seconds, then adds, “I was expecting Giacomo,” returning her gaze to the movie.

“That’s it?” Eve sputters. 

“What’s it?” Villanelle murmurs, glassy-eyed, still paying more attention to the screen than to Eve.

“You disappeared after you shot me and I’ve spent every minute since then searching for you,” Eve fumes.

“Not that hard, clearly,” Villanelle mutters scathingly.

“You shut up! I lied to a lot of people and burnt a lot of my rapidly dwindling savings to get to you, and all you can say is you were expecting ‘Giacomo’? Who the hell is Giacomo?”

“He lives downstairs.”

“You are absolutely infuriating!” Eve screams.

“Could you quiet down? Other people live here, you know.”

Eve walks over and turns off the TV, which prompts Villanelle to protest, “Hey,” though she doesn’t rise from the couch. Eve stands in front of the TV, arms crossed, staring down at Villanelle like an angry mother about to scold her child for not doing his homework.

“You haven’t killed anyone since you shot me.” Eve says it like an accusation. “At first I thought you were just trying to make me mad, and that definitely worked, but I’m here now, so what’s this part of the game?”

“What game?”

“You told me you loved me. You shot me. You disappeared without leaving any trace to me, but you tell _Konstantin_ your new address. Why would you do that? Quit it with the fucking coupons and listen to me!” Eve shouts, and Villanelle raises an eyebrow but obeys, placing the scissors down on the coffee table.

Eve continues, “You left me with nothing, just to drive me crazy. Well, mission accomplished. I’m crazy for you, so here I am. Let’s go to Alaska or whatever. I have nothing else but you.” 

“Does it ever occur to you, Eve, that not everything is about you?”

A chill runs down Eve’s spine as Villanelle raises her head and looks Eve directly in the eye for the first time. Villanelle continues, “Here are some answers for you: I haven’t killed anyone because I got a new job. I sent things to Konstantin because I miss him. And I didn’t do anything at all for you, or about you, or to play a game with you, because I don’t want to see you anymore.”

Eve feels even more upside-down than before. _Score one point for the “I’m in Hell” theory._ “Are you… Are you breaking up with me?”

“I’m asking you to leave my apartment.”

“Why didn’t you kill me, then?”

“I tried.”

“Well, finish the damn job!” Eve challenges. “I’m right here, and I’ve got nothing else going for me. Have at it!”

“No thanks.” Villanelle reaches for the TV remote. “I don’t really care anymore.”

“You don’t get to magically decide this is over,” Eve spits. “We’re talking about this.”

“What is there to say?” Villanelle offers. “We aren’t good for each other. I thought you’d see it too. I think it’s best if we go our separate ways.”

Eve feels the goal for which she’d thrown out everything else in her life slipping away, and knows she needs to do something drastic. Anything to get Villanelle’s attention for real and snap her out of whatever sadistic game this was. She grabs the scissors from the coffee table, brandishing them in front of her. “I’m not leaving until I get what I want.”

“Oh, real mature, Eve. If you really want to stab me again, can I at least get you a proper knife?”

Eve knows a threat like that won’t work, anyways, so it’s time for a different tactic. “If you won’t kill me, I might as well do it myself.” She fumbles with the scissors, poking them against her neck, then fumbles and tries opening them and pressing the sharp side of one blade against her throat.

“Put those down,” Villanelle says.

“You can’t bear to see me die after all?”

“No, you’re never gonna be able to finish the job with those, but it is really funny to watch.”

Eve realizes she’s getting nowhere, and pauses to consider: _what can I threaten that Villanelle actually cares about?_ Then inspiration strikes her like lightning. She raises the scissors up to her hair and begins snipping gleefully.

“Are you crazy?!” Villanelle screeches. Eve’s back slams against the ground as she’s tackled to the floor by Villanelle before the first lock of her hair floats lazily to the floor beside her. “Kill yourself if you want to, but don’t leave an ugly corpse.”

“You do care,” Eve manages with a smirk. 

“You’re so dramatic,” Villanelle rolls her eyes, but remains seated on top of Eve. “Just tell me what it is you want so I can go back to my movie.”

“What I want?”

Villanelle wrestles the scissors from Eve’s hand, closes them, and points them at Eve’s face, mimicking her tone from a minute ago: “‘I’m not leaving until I get what I want!’” 

Eve realizes she doesn’t have an answer. She’d said that mostly out of a desperate need to keep Villanelle’s attention, but it was a valid question. _What on earth do you want, Eve Polastri?_ In that moment, reunited with Villanelle – this strange, sweatpants-wearing coupon-clipping, drama-free Villanelle that currently had her pinned to the floor – Eve searched into the deepest part of herself for what she wanted, no, needed the most.

_I need to keep her interested, because what I want is her._ But Eve is surprised to find that there’s something else inside her – and that she even has room for another want inside her, even with all the space taken up by her all-consuming need to pursue Villanelle. 

She has spent the last week fueled, above all, by anger, which at first she thought was only at Villanelle for deserting her, but it’s still there inside her, boiling hotter than before, and Eve finally recognizes its true source.

“What I want is revenge,” Eve answers, and Villanelle’s eyes light up with interest. “I want to kill Carolyn Martens. I want to kill her dead. And I need you to help me.”

It is then that a small, elderly man opens the apartment door, takes in the scene before him, shrieks, and drops the package he’s holding to the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I finished drafting the final chapter of this yesterday, and guys, I'm so excited to share the rest of it with you.
> 
> Thanks for reading! Please let me know what you think here, or come chat with me on [Tumblr](https://imunbreakabledude.tumblr.com/).


	6. Show Me Yours

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eve treats Villanelle to a business lunch while she considers whether or not to assist in Eve's quest for revenge.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eagle-eyed readers may notice the rating has gone up with this chapter. So, uh, enjoy. ;)

Pinned to the ground as she is, Eve has to crane her eyeballs back to get an upside-down look at the man in the doorway. He’s old and hunched, hardly five feet tall, with a small mustache and a cap. He appears so shocked at the sight before him that Eve worries he may drop dead on the spot from a heart attack.

_"Cosa sta succedendo? Devo telefonare la polizia!"_ he squeaks.

_"Calmati, Giacomo,"_ Villanelle answers him sweetly, not moving. _"È la mia madrina."_ She smiles and adds, “Eve, Giacomo,” introducing them, all while remaining perched on Eve’s chest.

Giacomo is clearly confused and terrified by the way Villanelle is acting like everything is normal in this decidedly non-normal situation. Eve knows that feeling well, and much like she had done in the past, Giacomo evidently decides the best thing to do is to also proceed as if everything is normal. He stoops to pick up the package he’d brought from the floor, and Eve worries that he will hurt himself in the process. She wants to go over and help the poor man, but she can’t with Villanelle still on top of her.

_"Ho fatto dei biscotti,"_ Giacomo says, holding out the package to Villanelle, who finally rises, allowing Eve to draw in a full breath. She snatches the package from Giacomo’s hands, tears into it and stuffs a cookie into her mouth.

_"Non male,"_ she mutters, crumbs spilling out of her mouth.

As Eve stands up, she feels Giacomo’s gaze looking her up and down. Giacomo then approaches her and grabs her hand in both of his. _"Che bellissima madrina! Lei ha fatto un bel lavoro con Chiara."_

“Chiara?” Eve asks.

_"Mi sta visitando dall’America,"_ Villanelle says to the old man, as if making an excuse for Eve's behavior. _"A domani?"_

_"A domani,"_ Giacomo repeats. _"Buona sera, Chiara,"_ then he adds, in heavily accented English, “Good night, Eve!” before leaving.

“That’s Giacomo,” Villanelle says, carrying the box of cookies with her back to the couch and turning on the TV.

Eve is so disoriented by the distraction, she almost forgets what happened prior to Giacomo’s entrance until she spots the single lock of her hair on the floor, which reminds her that Villanelle never had a chance to respond to her request. Eve sits on the corner of the couch, the only open space where Villanelle isn’t stretched out. “So? Will you help me or not?”

“Let’s talk about it tomorrow,” Villanelle replies. “It’s getting late and I have work in the morning.”

“Who’s dying tomorrow?”

“I told you. I got a new job.”

Eve realizes she’s not going to get any real answers out of Villanelle at the moment, so she gives up and watches the ending of the Italian feel-good movie (even without understanding Italian, she can tell that the guy gets the girl) and observes as Villanelle demolishes the entire batch of cookies Giacomo brought. When the movie ends, Villanelle turns off the TV, gets up, and goes and tucks herself into the bed in the corner of the room without so much as a “good night” to Eve.

Eve remains seated on the couch for several minutes, unsure of how to proceed. I guess we’re talking in the morning. That’s better than nothing. But what to do now? _Do I… do I go join her in the bed?_ She is very unsure of where she and Villanelle stand at the moment, but she honestly has nowhere else to spend the night.

Inertia and familiarity win out, and Eve falls asleep on the couch. 

Eve is awoken by sounds of movement and raises her head, feeling stiff and sore after the night (this couch is less comfortable than Elena’s). She checks her phone to see that it’s 8:05 and looks over in the direction of the noise to see Villanelle in the kitchen, making a pot of coffee. She looks much more like herself than she did last night, now dressed in a cream-colored silk blouse and dark green high waisted pants, although it’s still an understated outfit compared to her usual standards. 

Eve is still half asleep and can’t fully process what she’s seeing, so she just watches silently as Villanelle pours coffee into a travel mug and goes towards the door. “Where are you going?”

“Work,” Villanelle says curtly. 

“I thought you were joking,” Eve mumbles.

“Why would I joke about that?”

“You said we were going to talk.”

“I have to go, Eve.”

“When do you get off?” Eve cringes at her choice of words. “I mean, when is your shift done?”

“I have my break at noon. You can buy me lunch.”

“Okay,” Eve replies, feeling a little like she’s still dreaming.

“_Palato Raffinato_ at noon. I’ll meet you there.”

And then she’s gone.

Left alone in the apartment with several hours to kill, of course Eve is going to snoop around, but she’s quickly disappointed to find that there isn’t much to find. The small studio is very sparsely decorated, and Eve supposes Villanelle hasn’t had much time yet to settle in; after all, it’s hardly been a week. But in the past she’d been more than capable of going on a shopping spree to deck out a closet and an apartment in lux mode in a short amount of time. Maybe it was a budget issue? She’d been clipping coupons last night, after all. But no, she’d bragged to Eve before the shot about how much money she had saved up. Perhaps the Twelve had frozen her bank accounts after they’d discovered Raymond was dead.

Unfortunately the lack of content in the apartment gives Eve very little to go on when it comes to trying to piece together what else Villanelle has been up to in the past week, and if their conversation last night was any indication, then Villanelle isn’t like to be very forthcoming about her recent activities.

Eve goes over the previous night’s events in her head, struggling to accept them as reality because they feel so nonsensical. _She wasn’t happy to see me. Or upset, really. She just didn’t care._

Usually, Eve is quick to rationalize Villanelle’s behavior, ready to jump to the conclusions (mostly correct ones) that others are unable to reach about how the woman’s strange mind works. Maybe it’s because she didn’t sleep well, but she’s at a loss right now.

_At least Konstantin was wrong_, Eve smugly comforts herself. _Villanelle has definitely changed._

Eve examines herself in the mirror of the tiny bathroom. Thankfully the damage she did with the scissors last night is minimal. She is blessed with such volume that the asymmetrical section that she’d chopped off last night isn’t obvious unless one knows to look for it.

_Good. I want to look nice for our date._

Eve makes sure to show up to the restaurant early, and spends the time anxiously waiting that Villanelle will not show up._ She might actually ditch me. She didn’t seem thrilled about having this conversation._ Just when Eve is beginning to truly panic, she spots Villanelle gliding lazily down the street towards her and instantly relaxes.

“I thought you might not come.”

“You’re paying, right?” Villanelle snorts, and they go get a table.

Eve fiddles with her napkin while Villanelle pores over the menu. “How was work?” she asks.

“I had an epiphany,” Villanelle says, still reading through the menu.

“Oh?”

“Being a grown-up means accepting that you will get up and do a boring job every day until you die.”

“That’s dark,” Eve ponders. “And not necessarily true.”

“I thought you would’ve figured that out by now, Eve, you’re so old.” Villanelle puts down her menu. “I think I’ll have the orecchiette.”

After the server comes by to take their orders (Eve hasn’t been able to focus so she quickly asks for the first thing on the menu – bolognese), Villanelle clears her throat and says in a very self-important voice, “Let’s discuss your proposal.”

“We have a bit of catching up to do first.”

“This is a business lunch. I’ll only be discussing business.”

_So that’s how it’s going to be_. “Fine. Whatever. I want Carolyn Martens dead. Will you help me?”

“Big boss. That should be fun.” Villanelle thinks for approximately three seconds then says, “Okay, I will help you. But there will be rules.”

“Rules?” Eve is aghast. “You hate rules!”

“I’m a grown-up now.”

_Oh, gimme a break_, is what Eve wants to say, but she stifles it – though she can’t stop herself from rolling her eyes. “What are the rules?”

“Rule One: I’m not killing her for you.”

“Alright,” Eve wasn’t expecting such a hard line on that.

“Unless you want to pay my fee.”

After seeing the prices on the menu, Eve knows she won’t be able to afford much of anything after this lunch, let alone Villanelle’s assassination fee. “Okay, fine. You won’t do the deed.”

“But I’ll be a consultant for you. Pro bono.”

Eve can’t help but chuckle, “Pro boner?”

Villanelle plows forward, “Rule Two: Keep it professional.”

“Oh, that’s rich coming from you,” Eve laughs.

“I’m serious, Eve,” Villanelle presses. “This is a weakness of yours. You were not very professional the last time we worked together.”

“Like you were ‘professional’ when you started talking to me through your microphone while you were masturbating?”

A horrified expression crosses Villanelle’s face. “You were listening to that? Eve, you are disgusting! You dirty pervert!”

“Shut up.”

“I feel violated.”

Eve is worried if she rolls her eyes anymore they’ll fall out of her head. “Is that all?”

Villanelle drops the offended act and smiles. “Rule Three is the most important of all: have fun!”

“Great. Fine. I agree to all those rules.”

“Even the fun one? Because you don’t seem like you get the spirit of it.”

_Now that I’ve humored you, this conversation is going where I want it to_, Eve decides. She leans forward, putting her elbows on the table. “Now for my rules. If you’re a consultant, then that means I get to ask you as many questions as I want.”

“I suppose so.”

Eve decides to warm up with some easy questions. “Why are you still in Italy?”

“I love pasta.”

At that moment, the server returns and places two steaming plates in front of each of them. Villanelle immediately stuffs a big forkful into her mouth, as if to emphasize her point. Eve suppresses the urge to tell her to chew more slowly. Instead she asks, “What’s the deal with Giacomo?”

“He owns the building,” Villanelle replies, washing the orecchiette down with a large swig of water. “He’s letting me stay in the apartment that his daughter lived in until she unfortunately passed away the day before I moved in.”

“You killed her?”

“Nope, cancer. Fantastic timing, though. I think I remind him of her. He brings me all kinds of sweets.”

“What’s your new job?”

“Perfume counter in a department store. The pay is shit, but I get a great employee discount. One hundred percent.” Villanelle looks up at Eve for a reaction, and when she doesn’t get one, adds, “The discount is stealing.”

“Yeah, I got that,” Eve replies.

Villanelle pouts. “You didn’t laugh.”

“Why _that_ job?”

“I had to leave my last job ‘cause my boss got axed.” 

Eve glowers, but decides the best way to deincentivize Villanelle’s dark humor is to ignore it. ”Did you bring me to the hospital?”

“You know orecchiette means ‘little ears’?”

“Did you bring me to the hospital or did you leave me bleeding?”

Villanelle pushes her pasta around with her fork. “Hm, I don’t think I remember.”

“Answer the question.”

Villanelle puts down her fork and looks Eve in the eyes. “I can’t.”

“Why? Because you know I’ll be angry?”

“Because no matter what I tell you, you won’t believe it,” Villanelle says quietly, with more bitterness than rage.

“I think I’m entitled to some truth here, after you manipulated me into murdering someone and then shot me.”

Villanelle looks upset now. “I’m so sick of you acting like I am always the bad guy. Always demanding that I explain myself. What about you, Eve? I told you I love you, and you walked away! You broke my heart! How about you explain why you did _that_.”

“I was upset!”

“Why? I don’t understand. You were fine. A little shocked, but everyone is their first time. And then you were suddenly upset that Raymond was dead?”

“I was upset because you lied. I don’t like when you lie to me. It makes me feel like…like you’re treating me like I’m anybody else.”

Villanelle looks into Eve’s eyes, puzzled for a few seconds. Searching. Genuinely trying to understand. Or at least that’s the meaning Eve projects onto her gaze. _Just as likely she’s imagining what it would be like to scoop my eyes out of my head and put them in a jar like fireflies._ Then Villanelle goes back to devouring her pasta and asks, “When do you want to do it?”

“Do what?”

Villanelle draws her fork across her throat and makes a mock death sound.

“I hadn’t considered,” Eve murmurs. “What’s your expert opinion?”

“Sooner is better,” Villanelle replies. “Especially for an amateur. Less time for you to wuss out.”

“Okay,” Eve realizes they’re really going to go through with this. But isn’t that what she wants? What she _craves_? “Soon, then.”

“I’ll ask my boss if I can have tomorrow off.”

“Ask?” Eve says, tucking into her bolognese for the first time (it’s really good). “What if he says no?”

“I can be very persuasive.”

Villanelle had sent Eve back to the apartment after lunch – well, technically she didn’t, she just said, “I’ll see you after work” – but Eve feels no desire to aimlessly wander the streets of Rome; she got her fill of that on her last trip. Eve is still baffled by Villanelle’s new job, mostly by the fact that she’s actually gone there and worked. She considers tailing Villanelle to find out if she’s bullshitting Eve or not, but the last time someone she knew tried tailing Villanelle, it ended quite badly. Besides, Eve doesn’t feel confident at the moment that Villanelle _won’t_ kill her for a wrong move.

On her way back she stops at a market, rationalizing that she’ll need to eat something for dinner, and if she’s cooking she might as well make enough for Villanelle, too. More importantly, she needs something to do to distract her from her anxiety of waiting for Villanelle to return, as well as the fact that she just made plans for premeditated murder tomorrow.

It’s almost six when Eve hears the doorknob turning and blissfully, it’s Villanelle who opens the door rather than Giacomo. She looks exhausted. “Working in retail really reminds me why I enjoy killing people so much.” She looks over to the kitchen and sees the evidence of Eve’s roast chicken in progress. “You cooked,” she observes, with a hint of admiration in her voice.

“I’m cook-_ing_,” Eve replies. “I’m glad you’re back.”

“You keep doing that,” Villanelle looks at Eve suspiciously. “You’re surprised to see me. Why?”

Eve flushes with embarrassment. “Nothing.”

Villanelle walks over, and it seems a new tenderness has overtaken her since the afternoon as she runs a hand through the asymmetrical part of Eve’s hair. “Tell me.”

“It’s stupid but… Every time you go, I get so afraid that it was the last time. That I’m never going to see you again,” Eve admits.

“You’re right. That is stupid.” Villanelle stares into Eve’s eyes while running a hand through her hair. “You shouldn’t worry about stupid things like that.” She leans against the counter next to Eve. “How much longer? I’m so hungry.”

“Me too,” says Eve. “But we don’t have to wait if you don’t want to.” Strangely enough, her worry had totally evaporated when Villanelle had told her to. _I can never resist when she tells me to do something_, she realizes, and she feels under a power that is not her own as she takes Villanelle’s face in her hands and draws her lips to Eve’s own.

“What are you doing?” Villanelle whispers, and Eve can feel the motion of her mouth against her lips.

“I thought this is what you wanted,” Eve says. “What’s stopping you?”

“You, usually,” Villanelle smiles.

“Not anymore.” Eve plunges forward into a kiss, and it’s odd: so many times in the past they’d come strangely close, so much so that it almost felt they’d done this before, and yet it feels somehow less taboo to actually do it.

A part of Eve is actually quite shocked at her present actions. There is a small but insistent voice within her – her sense of propriety, perhaps – that throughout this entire affair with Villanelle, had been full-time repeating in Eve’s head a chorus of, “_It’s not romantic, it’s not sexual, I’m just interested in her **psychologically** is all._”

That voice persists, but it’s shocked into silence by the actions Eve’s body is currently engaged in, watching intently as Eve moves with the confidence of someone much more experienced with seducing attractive multilingual psychopaths, kissing Villanelle and guiding her over towards the bed. _It will be informative to see how she reacts psychologically to this unexpected stimulus_, is all the voice has to say to that.

For her part, Villanelle seems into it, as far as Eve can tell (if she weren’t, after all, she surely could easily subdue Eve). She moans Eve’s name: “Eve… Eve…” It fills Eve with a primal drive, until it builds into more coherent phrases: “Eve, stop, you’re hurting me! Oh Eve, please don’t take my virtue!”

Eve stands up and glares down at Villanelle pouting and whimpering on the bedspread. “That’s not cute!” she snaps.

“Sorry. I thought you wanted to be the cat today,” Villanelle says. She sits up, and, faster than Eve can process it, stands and flips Eve down onto the bed where Villanelle was only a moment ago. “But you can be the mouse if you prefer.”

Villanelle has the reins now, and Eve melts into submission. Even the puritanical voice in her head is unable to form an argument against this. “Better?” Villanelle asks in between kisses across Eve’s collarbone.

“Yes,” Eve replies. Then, an idea: “Talk to me in Italian.”

Villanelle smirks and obliges. _"Ci sono le patate… La carne macinata…Passata di pomodoro…"_

_God, what a beautiful language_. Eve doesn’t understand a word, but damn if it isn’t sexy. Even more appealing than when Niko would talk to her in Polish.

_ "Ma certo, i piselli…Le cipolle, grosse e succose… Non dimenticare le carote…" _

Eve is losing lucidity.

_ "Soprattutto si dovrebbe ricordare l’ingrediente segreto: la salsa che viene da una cità in Inghilterra." _

Villanelle straddles Eve and gets on top of the bed, taking off her shirt, and the sight snaps Eve back to reality for a minute. There’s a small red line, maybe two inches long, off to the side of Villanelle’s torso, about the level of her belly button. Eve hasn’t seen it since she pulled the knife out of it.

“You made that,” Villanelle murmurs as she notices Eve staring. “You’re a part of me now.”

“I guess so.”

“Show me yours.”

Eve sits up and slowly pulls her shirt over her head. It doesn’t feel sexy; it feels almost medical, but at the same time, it’s the most intimate action she’s taken all day. After the shirt is off, she carefully peels off the gauze bandage that she frankly could’ve removed a day or two ago, but she hadn’t, because for some reason she couldn’t quite articulate, the realization that the wound was healing upset her.

When the last layer is removed, showing that tiny, scabbed-over hole, Villanelle’s fingers rush to the spot and touch, gently. It tickles.

“So small,” Villanelle comments.

“Hurt like a bitch, though,” Eve replies.

“Try getting stabbed and tell me which you prefer.”

Villanelle flops down flat on the bed next to Eve. Now that there’s articles of clothing on the floor, the immenent action feels more real to Eve.

“Is this really happening?” Eve asks.

“You tell me,” Villanelle replies. _She may be a murderer,_ Eve thinks, _but she’s great on consent._

“I think, yes, but…”

“Are you scared?”

“A little?” Eve admits. “Not scared, exactly, more… inexperienced. In this particular arena.”

“You’ve never been with a woman.”

“More importantly, I haven’t been with ten thousand different people.”

“Ouch,” Villanelle says. “It’s more like five thousand or so.”

“So… Just keep that in mind, I suppose.”

“Do you trust me?” Villanelle asks.

_We could be here all night if I tried to answer that honestly_. But Eve is too tired too unpack the many suitcases of baggage that question requires, so she replies, “Yes.”

“Then there’s no reason to be scared.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you don’t speak Italian, I recommend that you look up what Villanelle said to Eve. If you do speak Italian, I’m sorry – I studied it in school and I’m doing my best :) 
> 
> Thoughts? Feelings? Let me know!


	7. A Truly Exceptional Offer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eve travels back to London to seek her revenge, with Villanelle acting as her consultant.

Light filters in through the window of the apartment, hitting Eve’s face and waking her. For a moment, she thinks she’s at home and reaches out for her bedside table where her clock would be to check the time, but when her hand finds nothing but air, she remembers where she is. 

She slowly turns her head to see Villanelle a few inches away on the other side of the bed, wrapped up in the covers, still asleep. She looks so serene, so undisturbed, so _innocent_. Eve slowly edges out of the bed to avoid waking her and begins making coffee in the kitchen as quietly as she can.

Her memories of the previous night come back to her not as full scenes, but snatches – an image, a few words, a touch at a time. 

It was, in a word, different. Different than anyone Eve had been with before. Different than what she had expected. Different than anything she could’ve imagined, because what was Eve’s expertise in that area, anyway?

A snippet comes back to her, from later in the night, after they’d taken a break for dinner. They had sat at the tiny kitchen table and devoured the roast chicken Eve made, restoring their energy for more fun to come, and Eve had felt bold enough to ask, “Is this part of the routine?”

“Routine, how?”

“A little sex, a little snack, is that how it always goes? Does it get old?” Eve asks.

“Sometimes.”

“Tonight?”

“Not at all.”

That memory makes Eve's insides melt like butter.

She’s still confused about what changed between lunch and dinner. Villanelle had been so distant and standoffish, and then suddenly warm and receptive, like a switch had flipped. She wishes they could talk about it, but she doesn’t want to be that clingy girl asking “What are we?” the morning after. That’s so pedestrian, and this relationship is anything but regular.

A few minutes later, Eve has eggs and bacon sizzling in a pan on the stove, and feels arms wrap around her from the back.

“Jesus!” Eve starts. “How do you move so quietly?”

“Years of training,” Villanelle quips as she helps herself to a cup of coffee.

Eve finishes cooking and serves some eggs and bacon onto a plate for each of them. They eat breakfast in silence, but it’s a comfortable silence. Eve eats slowly, not wanting to move onto the next phase of the day.

However, there’s no delaying the inevitable, and Villanelle seems anxious to get on with it, so soon they’ve packed and exited the apartment. “Aren’t you going to call us a ride to the airport?” Villanelle asks impatiently as they exit.

“Let’s walk a bit first,” Eve says. 

“Why?”

“There’s something I want to show you.”

Eve hopes her sense of direction doesn’t fail her as they walk through Rome. It’s not long before Villanelle begins complaining.

“Where are we going? Do we have to walk? My feet hurt.”

Eve looks down at the high-heeled sandals Villanelle is sporting. Chic, but terrible for walking. “You should try Crocs,” Eve suggests.

“I might have to kill you for that,” Villanelle mutters. “Speaking of which, how are you going to kill Carolyn?”

“I haven’t thought about it,” Eve says.

“You want revenge and you haven’t fantasized about how you are going to do it?” Villanelle is shocked.

“I figured you might have ideas.”

Villanelle’s eyes light up, and Eve is glad she’ll have something else to focus on than complaining for a few minutes. “To maximize pain, you could try death by a thousand cuts. I’ve always wondered, could you really get to a thousand? A thousand is a _lot_ of cuts.” She looks at Eve to see if the idea has registered any interest.

“I don’t know if I could manage that.”

“Then there’s humiliation. That can be even worse than physical pain. We could truss her up naked outside MI6. Or leave her dead in her office, make it look like she choked herself out while masturbating to furry porn.”

“I might just shoot her.”

Villanelle gives Eve the most withering stare in the world, but concedes, “I suppose you can’t beat the basics if you’re squeamish.” She furrows her brow and levies her full condescension on Eve. “Are you sure you’re going to be able to go through with it?”

“I did before,” Eve says curtly.

“When you thought it was your only option. But I’m tired, Eve, and I can’t put on a little play for you every time.”

“Here. Stop,” Eve says, bringing them to a halt.

“Wow,” Villanelle yawns. “Another street that looks exactly like the others. I’m so glad you brought me here.”

“See that café?” Eve points. 

“Yes.”

“I robbed that place.”

Villanelle cracks a smile. “No, you didn’t.”

“After I left the hospital, I had nothing. I assaulted a teenager and robbed the register.”

“You begged for a free coffee and said thank you politely.”

Eve smirks. “Let’s see if my friend is working today.”

They enter the café and it turns out the same teenager is working the morning shift once again. He mutters _"Buon giorno"_ on autopilot, then looks up at Eve and jumps back.

“Hi! Remember me?” Eve asks cheerily.

“I don’t get crazy Americans attacking me every day,” he says, his voice shaking. Eve looks at Villanelle to see her reaction, but she keeps her face neutral, not giving Eve the satisfaction. Eve will have to up the ante.

“I wanted to say, I’m really sorry about that. Truly. I was in a rough spot.” Eve points to Villanelle. “She’s the one who shot me, you know.”

_"Davvero?"_ The boy looks slightly interested, but is still backing away from the counter skittishly. “She doesn’t look scary. But then, neither do you.”

_"Non ho mai visto questa donna, per favore, aiutami,"_ Villanelle whimpers to the cashier.

_"Stai bene? Vorresti che io telefoni la polizia?"_ the boy asks, nervously.

Even without understanding the full exchange, Eve can tell Villanelle is being a little shit. “Shut up. She’s fucking with you.” She elbows Villanelle in the ribs.

“Okay, fine, I shot her,” Villanelle says in English. “But she stabbed me first, so we’re even.” She grins menacingly (whether or not she meant it so, Eve doesn’t know, but Villanelle’s smiles always looked a bit menacing).

The poor boy, who may still be feeling the effects of the concussion Eve gave him, is rattled enough to step back to the phone on the wall behind the counter and begin dialing.

“Fuck, he’s actually calling the police, let’s go!” Eve squeals, grabbing Villanelle by the hand. “That’s what you get for doubting me!” As they run out, Eve can’t help but laugh, and she looks over and sees that Villanelle is laughing too. _Is this the first time we’ve been happy concurrently?_ Eve wonders. But she stifles her incessant need to catalogue everything – why ruin the moment?

Eve has gotten quite familiar with the fight between Rome and London over the past couple weeks, but this trip is unlike others because she isn’t alone with her thoughts. Instead of being isolated and consumed with plots of how she’ll track down Villanelle, the woman is sitting right next to her, playing with the tray table in front of her.

“I hate flying coach,” Villanelle grumbles.

“Sorry. My budget isn’t as big as the Twelve’s,” Eve replies. 

“I wonder how much of a commotion it’d take to crash this plane,” Villanelle muses. The man seated in the window seat on Eve’s other side looks up with concern.

“She’s joking,” Eve claims with a forced smile. “Ha ha, good one, sweetie.”

“Sweetie?”

“Shut up and try to act normal,” Eve whispers. “I’m not in the mood for an emergency landing.”

“There’s no movie. I’m bored.”

“Read a magazine,” Eve snaps, grabbing the travel magazine from the seat-back pocket and tossing it in Villanelle’s lap.

Villanelle flips through the pages disinterestedly, muttering criticisms of the various locales pictured based on her previous travels. “Good food there… Bad weather, but at least that job was fun…” 

She stops, transfixed on one page, and holds open the page for Eve to see. It’s a bleak yet beautiful vista of a lighthouse on a shore, silhouetted against a clear grey-blue sky. The caption identifies the location as Juneau, Alaska.

“Have you ever been?” Villanelle asks quietly.

“No. Have you?”

“No,” Villanelle traces the outline of the lighthouse with an outstretched finger.

“Maybe we’ll change that,” Eve says. It’s a risky suggestion. They haven’t discussed in the slightest what their future will be, but Eve lets the possibility hang in the air between them.

“We need to finish your project first. You have to give me some more information if you want me to make a plan.”

Eve glances warily at the man seated in the window seat. _Does she really expect to plan this murder with an audience of people all around us?_

“We need a location,” Villanelle continues.

“For the _surprise party_, yes,” Eve quickly adds. Villanelle looks at her quizzically, and Eve adds “We can plan the surprise party here on the plane if you want.”

Villanelle rolls her eyes, but continues, “What’s her house like?”

“Too secure. We’d never get in there,” Eve says.

“Then where do you expect to have this ‘surprise party’? Right in the lobby of MI6?”

Eve thinks for a moment. Carolyn was an elusive woman under ordinary circumstances, and in all likelihood, now that Aaron Peel was taken care of, she was now onto another top secret project that could have taken her anywhere. Aside from her home and the MI6 office, where else could they even expect to find her? Then it hit her.

“There’s one other spot we can try.”

“Do you think it’ll work?” Eve asks doubtfully, staring at the grey stone building in front of them.

“Better. I think it’ll be fun,” Villanelle replies. “If she actually shows up.”

“Carolyn loves her hobbies,” Eve assures her, remembering meeting Carolyn at this fencing gym to discuss work. The woman did whatever it took to make sure some of her time was her own.

“When will she be here?”

“How would I know?” Eve replies.

Villanelle groans. “I have to do everything, don’t I?” She hands Eve her bag and strides towards the front door. Eve almost calls out, to tell her to stop, to ask what her plan is, but knows that it wouldn’t do any good.

She watches from a distance as Villanelle pokes her head around the door, calls to someone inside, and gets a gangly, young employee to come outside and talk to her. They chat for a few minutes. Villanelle laughs and tosses her hair. The gangly young man shakes nervously, clearly awestruck by such a beautiful girl talking to him. After a few minutes, he returns inside and Villanelle strides back, reclaiming her bag from Eve. “She has an appointment every Thursday afternoon.” Then frowns. “It is Thursday, right?”

“Crap.”

“What ‘crap’? This is perfect.”

“I’m not ready,” Eve whines. “First of all I need a weapon–”

“Taken care of.” Villanelle nonchalantly pulls out a gun from her handbag. 

Eve has to restrain herself from screaming and hisses, “Is that the same gun you shot me with?!”

“Is that a problem?” 

Eve answers that with a glare. 

Villanelle gets defensive. “What am I supposed to do, throw it away? It’s a perfectly good gun. ”

“How did you even get it on the plane?”

Villanelle smirks. “You work as long as I have, you pick up some tricks. Now stop making excuses.”  


In an effort to prove her mettle, Eve strides towards the door and is about to walk right into the foyer when she feels a tug and Villanelle pulls her back, into her own body. Her heart flutters for a minute, but it’s not a romantic gesture; Villanelle nods up at the small security camera mounted inside the door.

“Disguises won’t be worth shit if they get us on CCTV walking into the place.”

“This is why I need you,” Eve admits.

With Villanelle leading the way, they loop around the side of the building and slip in through a delivery entrance, which brings them into a small loading and storage room. Villanelle slowly cracks open the door to make sure no one is around, and luckily, there aren’t any cameras in this part of the building, so they’re able to walk about freely.

They find the women’s locker room and suit up with some borrowed equipment. _It’s convenient that Carolyn enjoys an activity that allows us to completely hide our faces and blend right in_, Eve thinks as she puts on a facemask.

Faces covered, they are able to roam with less concern, and they make their way onto the main gym floor. 

“She should be here within the hour unless that ugly clerk was lying to me,” Villanelle says, her voice muffled a bit by the mask. “Let’s act like we belong.” She picks up a fencing foil from the rack and offers another to Eve.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Eve asks, accepting the sword.

“Quit being such a scaredy cat. _En garde_,” Villanelle says, bending her knees and extending the foil in front of her.

Eve complies and crosses her foil with Villanelle’s. Before she can blink, Villanelle advances, stabbing and whipping her sword wildly. Eve retreats quickly, dodging the onslaught.

“This is no fun,” Villanelle taunts Eve as she pushes her further and further back. “You aren’t even trying.”

“You’re right,” Eve shouts through her mask. “I’m not.” The thirty seconds she had allowed Villanelle to lead the way had confirmed her suspicion that Villanelle had never touched a foil, epee, nor sabre before, so Eve was able to take back control of the match with confidence. Five summers at fencing camp, though many years had passed since, provided her with the skills to easily parry, jab, and force Villanelle back the distance she’d come and then some.

By the time she forces Villanelle to the end of the area, Eve has racked up eight points by her own count, and a ninth stab makes Villanelle stumble backwards and land on her ass. It isn’t often that Eve gets the better of Villanelle like this, so to add insult to injury, with a few fancy swishes of the tip of her foil, she disarms Villanelle, knocking her weapon to the floor. She wishes she could see Villanelle’s face, but imagining her barely contained fury is almost better.

Eve is about to gloat when her feet disappear from under her, kicked from beneath her causing her to drop her sword and land flat on her back. She looks up to Villanelle standing above, pointing the tips of both foils at her chest. “That’s against the rules,” Eve protests.

“I hate rules,” Villanelle replies.

Eve is about to berate Villanelle for being a sore loser when her blood freezes in her veins as she spots Carolyn far across the room, entering from the foyer.

She stands and nods in that direction, and Villanelle drops the foils. “Time to go.”

Villanelle takes the lead as they trail Carolyn to the locker room. After Carolyn pulls out her fencing kit and goes into a stall to change clothes, Villanelle undoes her chestpiece and pulls out a tiny bottle from her shirt. She unscrews the lid and carefully adds a few drops of liquid to the inside of Carolyn’s facemask before replacing it. She tucks the bottle away and snaps up her chestpiece just in time for Carolyn to emerge.

Eve makes herself busy pretending to fiddle with her shoelaces and keeping her face pointed away from Carolyn just in case she can see through the mask. It may be overkill, because Carolyn simply says “Cheers,” to greet the two of them and begins suiting up in her protective gear. Eve’s heart races as Carolyn adds each piece slowly until she finally dons the mask and collapses to the floor.

“Chloroform is so handy,” Villanelle chirps. “I really should never go anywhere without it.”

They sneak out of the building the way they came, this time hoisting Carolyn over their shoulders. When one other patron spots them leaving the locker room, Villanelle handles the challenge once again, putting on a British accent and sputtering, “She just collapsed! It’s awfully frightening! We’re taking her straight to the doctor!”

Eve is dumbfounded at how easy it was to kidnap a grown woman from a public space. Was all crime this stupidly easy? Why weren’t more people getting away with it? Then she realizes, maybe they are, because the whole definition of getting away with it means that she wouldn’t have heard about it. 

“Where are we going?” Eve asks as she realizes after a few minutes of walking that she has no idea of their destination.

“We need some privacy,” Villanelle says, a bit short of breath from hoisting Carolyn’s weight (admittedly, Eve isn’t pulling her fair share). “Lucky for you, I know a spot that isn’t too far.”

They make quite the sight, three people clad in full fencing gear, one unconscious, plodding through London. Eve is absolutely terrified, sure that any moment police are going to jump out and apprehend them, but Villanelle doesn’t seem nervous in the slightest. Eve remembers what Konstantin told her: “She is fearless, but it makes her careless.” _Do I need to put a stop to this?_ Eve wonders. _Is it my responsibility to be afraid for the both of us?_

Although the trio attracts some stares, nobody questions them. Eve begins to realize how little most people want to get involved with anything out of the ordinary. 

Villanelle leads them to a door that’s familiar to Eve. “Your old flat? Carolyn will recognize it. It might be under surveillance. Or someone else might have moved in.”

“This building has a basement that no one ever uses,” Villanelle replies. She pulls open the door and hoists Carolyn’s limp body up through it, then leads Eve the way down the stairs to the dark, musty basement. Eve prays that Villanelle is right and they won’t be interrupted.

It’s some time before Carolyn comes to. She groans, blinks, and raises her head, taking in her surroundings. A less world-worn individual might scream, cry, or at least hyperventilate, upon waking up tied to a chair in a small, dark basement, but Carolyn simply sighs.

Eve and Villanelle both stand on the far end of the basement out of Carolyn’s view. As the woman raises her head, Villanelle gives Eve a look, as if to say, _“It’s all you, now”_, squeezes her hand once, and passes her the gun.

Villanelle melts into the shadows as Eve walks across the room into Carolyn’s sightline. “Have a nice nap?” Eve says, trying to sound intimidating, but her mouth was a little dry so the first couple words are more of a croak.

“Hello Eve,” Carolyn says. “I had a feeling I hadn’t seen the last of you.”

“No. But I will be the last thing you see,” Eve says, feeling quite proud of her menacing banter.

“Where is she?” Carolyn asks.

“What?” Eve is thrown by Carolyn’s casual manner and command of the situation, even though she really shouldn’t be surprised, knowing Carolyn.

“We’ve been keeping tabs on you since the incident in Italy, just in case you pulled something like this – though I must sincerely congratulate you; this is bolder than I expected. I know that you came back to London, harassed Kenny, and paid a visit to Konstantin. I know that you took a trip to Rome two days ago, and I know you flew back this morning with the company of one ‘Billie Marie Morgan’. So you’ve brought Villanelle here to kill me, I suppose?”

Eve tries to form a witty comeback, but can’t come up with anything that’ll get her power back in this situation, but comes up with nothing. Villanelle comes to the rescue, stepping into Carolyn’s view, and greeting her, “Hi Carolyn. You look great. Did you get a haircut?”

“Thanks for noticing,” Carolyn replies, smiling slightly. “You’re looking well yourself. I don’t suppose I could offer you money or absolution to dissuade you from killing me?”

Villanelle sticks her hands in her pockets and grins. “I’m flattered. But I’m only here as a chaperone for Eve’s big night.”

Carolyn looks at Eve, back at Villanelle, and then at Eve again, before sighing, “Well, that’s a relief.”

Eve’s face burns with anger. “You don’t think I’ll do it?”

“I don’t,” Carolyn replies.

“Well, I will!” Eve asserts, raising the gun and pointing it at Carolyn’s chest. “I’ve killed before.”

“Really?” Carolyn blinks with surprise. “When?”

“Remember Raymond? I chopped him to bits with an axe.”

Carolyn glances back to Villanelle. “That wasn’t you?”

Villanelle laughs, “I know, right?”

Carolyn nods and pauses, considering the new information. “Bully for you, Eve. I didn’t think you had it in you. If you know what’s good for you, you won’t kill me though.”

“I will,” Eve says, trying to convince herself more than anything. This is the moment she’s been waiting for. This is the chance to release the flames of anger that have been stoked inside her since Aaron’s death – or earlier. Hadn’t Carolyn taken so much from her even before? “It’s your fault. All of it. Aaron Peel… Raymond… Hugo… Niko… Bill! Everything that has happened since you ‘tapped me on the shoulder’ has been absolutely primally fucked up. You ruined my life.”

“Surely you can’t blame me for all that when the perpetrator of most of it is standing right next to you.” Carolyn looks pointedly at Villanelle, who simply shrugs in response.

Eve won’t allow herself to be distracted by Carolyn’s games. “You are a cold manipulator. You’ve been pulling the strings this whole time, using me and Villanelle and everyone else as your little puppets, but it ends now.” She raises the gun and clicks the safety off.

Carolyn’s eyes widen slightly, almost imperceptibly, which must be her equivalent of screaming in terror. “I can tell you’re rather unhinged, but I beg you to reconsider. I can make you quite a good offer if you don’t kill me. I can give your job back–”

“No thanks,” Eve spits. “I have no desire to be one of your pawns again.”

Carolyn continues, a tiny trickle of desperation creeping into her voice. “Well then, I can get you off the hook for this or any other trouble you’ve likely gotten yourself into. I could clear Oksana’s name as well. The two of you could ride off into the sunset, free as birds. Divorce Niko. Buy a house together. _I’ll_ buy the house if you like.”

“No… I…” Eve hesitates, trailing off as she considers exactly what Carolyn is offering. _You’ve dug yourself into a really deep hole this past week_, the sane part of her brain reminds her, _and here is someone throwing you a rope_. So much of her decision making lately has been on the basis of having no other choice, but what if she could go back to some semblance of a normal life? Certainly not the life she had before, but a new normal. _No explosions… just bubbles_.

Carolyn picks up on Eve’s indecision and dangles the metaphorical carrot enticingly. “This is a truly exceptional offer. I recommend that you accept it. Or you could be like her and kill first, think rationally later.”

Eve looks up at Villanelle, whose face is a total blank, offering not the slightest cue to egg her on or encourage her to take the deal. Eve stares into her eyes pleadingly, but Villanelle doesn’t so much as blink. The message is clear: _“I’m not giving you any excuse to pin this one on me. Whatever you do, it’s your descision to own.”_

Eve cocks the gun and squeezes the trigger furiously. Three loud bangs in quick succession, then a series of clicks as she continues pulling the trigger over and over, unable to stop until Villanelle swoops in and gently pulls the gun from her hand.

“You did it,” she murmurs, pulling Eve into a hug. “What do you feel?”

“Nothing,” Eve breathes.

After Raymond, Eve had been thrown into shock by the sheer volume of feeling that consumed her – terror, disgust, horror, triumph, and a visceral pride at having (apparently) saved Villanelle – but now? She felt empty. The moment the first bullet entered Carolyn, it was like it pierced a hole in Eve as well, allowing all of her anger to rush out and leaving her a hollow shell with nothing but stale air inside.

“I’m so proud of you,” Villanelle says, hugging Eve tighter. Once she’s released, Eve takes the gun back from Villanelle and turns it over in her hands. It feels oddly fitting that this gun, the same one that shot her in Italy, was the instrument of this kill. Eve pockets it, a souvenir of her transformation.

“What now?” Eve asks. “The project is done. Are you going to disappear on me again?”

“You know I won’t,” Villanelle says, and kisses Eve deeply. “I love you.”

“So… Alaska?”

“Why don’t you say it back?” Villanelle asks quietly. Eve’s breath catches in her throat, but she doesn’t say anything. So Villanelle continues, “Do you love me?”

_Don’t I?_ Eve thinks. But instead she says: “I’d do anything for you.”

“Really?”

“Really.” And Eve means it. Having murdered someone of her own volition, she feels capable of anything. 

“Then there’s one small thing we will do before we take our trip,” Villanelle smiles.

“What?”

“We are going to pay Niko a visit,” Villanelle grabs Eve’s hand and leads her past Carolyn’s bleeding corpse, towards the stairs. “And you are going to kill him.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was a big one... came out longer than I expected, for better or for worse. Please let me know what you think! Final chapter comes next week!
> 
> I was super busy this week and didn't have time to write it yet but... I've gotten an idea for a bonus chapter to this fic, that I could hopefully find time to post this week if people are interested in a little extra dose of this story :)
> 
> EDIT: The bonus chapter now exists! If you're in the mood for a diversion, click [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21624337) to find out what Villanelle was up to before Eve found her, and why her mood shifted after she got home from work!


	8. Footprints

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eve faces Villanelle's final test before they can run away together.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case you missed it, there is a [bonus chapter](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21624337) that reveals what Villanelle was up to before Eve found her.
> 
> And without further ado... enjoy the finale!

Villanelle tugs at Eve’s hand, taking the stairs up from the basement two at a time. “Come on, there’s no time to waste. If we move quickly, we can be on a plane to Alaska by morning.”

“Slow down,” Eve says, breathing heavily, as Villanelle drags her out through the door of the apartment building out into the street.

“We can’t slow down. You’re ready now,” Villanelle grins giddily. “I know you are.”

“I am,” Eve asserts. “I’m ready. But why do I have to kill Niko? I mean – why bother? We’re done. I don’t even know where he is.”

“He’s not done with you,” Villanelle replies.

“Yes he is.”

“He’s not. He told me. I know he was telling the truth because I had a knife on him.”

As Eve opens her mouth to chastise, Villanelle cuts her off. “Don’t be angry. It was a mistake, okay? You were being so mean to me about Amber and Aaron and it was really pissing me off. I had to let it out somewhere.”

“So you attacked him?”

“I just asked him a few questions,” Villanelle claims innocently. “And… locked him in a closet with his dead girlfriend.”

“You killed Gemma?” Eve intends to say it with a furious tone, but it comes out more lukewarm once she realizes she really doesn’t care.

“I didn’t lay a finger on Niko,” Villanelle reassures Eve, putting her arms around her protectively, “because I learned from the past.” She releases Eve but grabs her hand again, starting to walk at a brisk pace. “We should get farther away from the body.”

Hurrying to keep up, Eve presses, “What do you mean, you learned? From what?”

“From my childish mistakes.”

“Which–”

“Come on Eve, you know what I am talking about. Don’t make me say it.”

_She learned not to hurt Niko because of “childish mistakes”? What does Niko have to do with Villanelle’s past?_ Then Eve makes the connection.

“Anna,” she breathes. “After you killed her husband, she wanted nothing to do with you anymore.”

“As long as he was around, she would never be mine the way I was hers,” Villanelle says, darkly, and Eve can see her slipping back into the memory of how it felt. “So I got rid of him, but it didn’t help. I didn’t understand why. But now I do.”

“It’s good that you didn’t hurt Niko,” Eve says. “But can’t we just forget about him? I am _not_ Anna.”

“You’re not,” Villanelle agrees. “You’re so much stronger. You can say goodbye to Niko once and for all, and then you can be mine and I can be yours. Nothing else will stand between us.”

They’ve been half-jogging for several minutes, and Eve slows down and sits down on a bench to catch her breath and think. Villanelle sits by Eve’s side, looking at her with concern.

“If it will make you feel better, I can answer your question from yesterday.”

“What question?”

Villanelle looks down at the ground as she says, “After I shot you, I thought you were dead.”

Eve swallows hard and braces herself for the rest. “I walked away and I didn’t look back. I asked some people around if they heard a shot from the ruins and waited to make sure someone went in to look. I wanted to make sure they found your body before it started to look gross. I guess that is how you ended up at the hospital.” She slowly looks up to peek at Eve’s reaction. “You may be mad, but that’s the truth. I know you don’t like it when I lie to you. So I won’t.”

“Thank you,” Eve says.

They sit in silence for a few minutes, watching the sun begin to set, while Eve considers the paths in front of her. Refusing to kill Niko could be termed the “safe” path, but hadn’t she rejected that path so many times already, most recently by turning down Carolyn’s offer of amnesty and shooting her instead? And really, what “safety” awaited her by refusing? Best case scenario, she’d lose Villanelle and end up alone with absolutely nothing, even worse off than when she’d escaped the hospital in Italy. Worst case, Villanelle would kill her. She isn’t sure on the odds of those two options, but neither appeals to her.

And the other path – the murderous path – isn’t she already far down that road? It would be madness to turn back now, if it were even possible. 

“If I do it,” Eve asks, eventually, “What happens after?”

“We have absolutely mind-blowing sex. Then, whatever you want,” Villanelle answers, then corrects herself: “Whatever _we_ want.”

Eve doesn’t say anything else, just stares aimlessly at the buildings across the street. Villanelle scooches closer to her and puts her hand on Eve’s. “Are you scared you won’t be able to?”

“No,” Eve says. “I’m scared because I know I can.”

A few minutes later, they’ve said a temporary goodbye. Villanelle took care to make sure Eve was going to be alright on her own for an hour or two, then left for “preparations.”

“I’ll get everything ready,” she had assured Eve. “You just rest and clear your head. I’ll call you when it’s time.”

Eve isn’t sure what to do with herself. She doesn’t feel scared or helpless like she did after Raymond; the empty feeling persists. Then she realizes the emptiness is literal: she’s starving. She stops at a fast food joint and devours a burger and milkshake, feeling much better once her stomach is full.

She keeps checking her phone every few minutes to see if there’s word from Villanelle, but whatever she’s doing is taking a while. She had wanted to ask a lot of questions, like: _How do you know where Niko is? How are you going to get him? Where are you going to bring him?_ But Villanelle had shushed her and told her not to worry about the details. 

Eve needs something else proactive to do to pass the time. She’s looking through her bag for a stick of gum when she brushes past the gun and realizes the perfect errand to take care of: get more bullets. Shooting Carolyn had been easier than she expected, so much so that she’d emptied all the bullets from the pistol into Carolyn’s head without even realizing. Eve decides that she’s much more of a gun person than an axe person, so this would be the way to go from now on.

She looks up the location of the nearest sporting and hunting store on her phone and, upon arrival, tries to enter with the air of someone who knows what she’s doing. She walks amongst the racks of guns, ammo, and other accessories, trying her hardest to figure out what kind of bullets she needs without appearing totally clueless. Despite her acting efforts, a stocky salesman with a huge beard clocks her confusion and approaches her. “Can I help you find something, ma’am?”

“Just some, um, bullets. But I’m trying to find the right type.”

“I’ll be glad to help you. Soon as I see your license.”

_Shit._ “I forgot it at home,” Eve improvises. “I’m always forgetting things! My husband says I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on.”

“Forgot it,” the salesman repeats, his skepticism evident. “Sorry, but I can’t sell you anything unless you come back with the license.”

_Goddamn this country and its stupid effective gun laws,_ Eve thinks. _This would’ve been so much easier in America._

“Thanks, I’ll be back later,” she tells the salesman with a forced smile. So much for that plan. 

As she exits the store, she hears “psst” and looks in the direction of the sound to see a shifty looking man with a large, rumpled jacket. “Forgot your license, eh? I can help you out,” he says, and grins unevenly, showing a couple of chipped and filled teeth.

At least she doesn’t have to pretend to have noble intentions with this creep. She opens her purse and lets the man look in to see the gun. “Got bullets for this?” The man nods and beckons her to come with him.

She follows him down an alley and he opens a dirty, unmarked door to bring her into what seems like it might be a storeroom at the back of a restaurant. The shelves are filled with boxes and crates of various weapons and ammunition. 

The man pulls a small cardboard box about the size of a stapler out from one of the crates, and holds it out to Eve. Before she can grab it, he says, “Hundred quid.”

Eve bites back the urge to complain about the price, knowing that criminals can’t be choosers. Fortunately, she has enough cash on her, though her rainy-day stash is almost completely wiped out. She hopes Villanelle will be able to pay for their tickets to Alaska.

She’s just finished figuring out how to load the new bullets into the gun when her phone rings. She carefully tucks the gun into her waistband, making sure it’s secure, and answers.

“It’s time,” Villanelle says. “I got everything we need and found a perfect spot. I’ll text you the address. Will you be able to find your way?”

“Yes. I’ll see you soon.”

Eve gets a cab to a spot about a half mile away from the address that Villanelle sent, then follows the GPS directions on foot the rest of the way. It’s a bit off the beaten path, taking her down a dirt road along the shoreline. The landscape is eerie in the twilight, and there aren’t many buildings around, so Eve wonders if she’s gone to the wrong place. Eventually, she rounds a curve in the road and spots Villanelle leaning up against a presumably stolen car, beaming as soon as she spots Eve. 

“Surprised to see me?” Eve shouts, still dozens of meters away.

“I started to think you weren’t coming,” Villanelle calls back. “Now I know how you always feel.”

Eve speeds up to close the remaining distance between her and Villanelle and is greeted with a quick kiss. She’s about to proudly share her own preparations, but before she can pull out the gun, Villanelle produces a knife and slides it into Eve’s hand. 

“Isn’t it beautiful?”

Eve examines the knife. The blade is bright, polished silver, glinting in the moonlight. The handle is wrapped in deep brown leather that gives it an almost soft texture, though it’s still tempered and strong. “Yes, it is.” She passes it back and forth between her two hands, wondering if it’d upset Villanelle if she decided to use the gun instead. 

“I used a knife just like that on Maxi.” Villanelle notices Eve’s hesitation and caresses her face reassuring her, “You don’t need to cut his penis off or anything.” Then adds, “Unless you want to.”

Eve looks around and wonders, “Where on earth are we?”

“I know it’s remote,” Villanelle admits, “But as soon as I spotted it, I knew it was perfect.”

She directs Eve’s gaze past the car, above some trees out towards the shoreline. Eve sees a lone lighthouse standing on a rocky outcrop, surrounded on three sides by sea. It’s not lit, and by the looks of it, it’s probably been out of commission for years, but even in the dusk, Eve can tell what it reminded Villanelle of: the picture of Alaska in the travel magazine.

“And you got, um…” Eve trails off. Villanelle gets the meaning, and in response, goes to open the trunk of the car, revealing Niko’s unconscious body crammed in awkwardly. Eve’s breath catches in her throat as she takes him in – unconscious, but alive. Vulnerable.

“Give me a hand with this, will you?” Villanelle says as she takes one of Niko’s arms over her shoulder and starts to hoist him up. 

Eve’s heartbeat speeds up, but she coldly reminds herself: _if you are planning to kill him, surely you can carry his body without getting squeamish._ She crouches down and grabs Niko’s other arm, lifting him from the trunk with Villanelle’s help, and the two of them carry him all the way over to the lighthouse and up the stairs. 

When they reach the top floor, Villanelle beckons Eve to continue past the old, broken down lantern and outside to the balcony. She leads Eve towards a rickety chair with some rope that presumably she had set up before Eve arrived, and they plop Niko down onto it, his head hanging limply to his chest. Villanelle ties Niko securely to the chair.

“Is that necessary?” Eve asks. “He’s out cold.”

“We have to wait for him to wake up,” Villanelle insists. “Otherwise, it doesn’t count.”

And so they do. Eve isn’t sure of exactly how long it takes, but the moon rises a few degrees in the sky. They wait in silence, but Villanelle plays with Eve’s hair and caresses her hands the whole time, communicating volumes of information through touch.

Eventually, Niko stirs. Eve shivers and grips the knife tightly as he groans and raises his head. “Where am I?” He looks up and sees Eve, still not fully coherent, and says, “Eve, thank God. I dreamed that I was attacked by–” then he notices Villanelle standing next to her.

“You!” He growls. “What are you doing? I thought you weren’t going to kill me, because Eve would never forgive you. So what now? You think it will be more fun to make her watch?”

“Not exactly,” Villanelle replies with barely contained glee. “She is going to do it.”

“Hi, Niko,” is all Eve can manage to say.

Niko appears dumbfounded for a moment, then starts to laugh. “Why am I not surprised…”

“It’s been a while since we’ve seen each other,” Eve says.

“Yeah,” Niko laughs. “She locked me in a storage unit and no one came to let me out for two days… but how have _you_ been, Eve?”

“She shot me.”

“And yet you’re here with her.”

“Yes.”

“About to kill me.”

“That’s the plan.”

“Alrighty then.” Niko nods and sighs.

“You don’t think I’ll do it?” Eve prods him.

“No, I’m quite sure you will.”

Eve isn’t expecting that answer after all the condescension she’d been subject to from Villanelle and Carolyn. She doesn’t know what to say.

Niko continues, “For the longest time, I was so upset that this was happening to you. That _she_ was doing this to you. I didn’t understand why you were the victim of her obsession. I hated everything she was doing to you, everything she was turning you into. But now I see.” Tears begin to well up in his eyes. “It’s been you this whole time. You have done all of this, Eve. You are not the victim. You’ve done this yourself.”

Eve looks into Niko’s eyes, and he looks back, differently than he’s ever looked at her before. A tear trickles down his cheek, and Eve can feel moisture building up in her eyes as well. But isn’t this all wrong? He’s yelled at her, called her worse before, and now – he’s blaming it all on her? None of it on Villanelle? Eve begins to cry, not from sadness or hurt, but because Niko is looking into her eyes and for the first time, seeing her for what she really is.

She might have sat there for several minutes simply crying if not for Villanelle grunting, “Are you going to let him talk to you like that? Get on with it.”

Niko sniffs, “Go ahead and do it. Maybe it’s all meant to be this way. Maybe I am just a body in your story.”

“You should _be_ so honored,” Villanelle interjects. “It’s the greatest love story ever told.”

“Look, Eve,” Niko pleads. “She wants you to be in pain. She wants this to be hard for you.”

“The harder it is, the more it shows that she loves me,” Villanelle says plainly.

“I can’t stop whatever weird connection there is between the two of you. The only power I have is to choose not to fight it.” Niko’s voice begins to crack. “I can’t understand… I won’t pretend to understand why this is what you need, but… All I want to do is make it easier for you. Because, God help me, I still love you, Eve. I wish I could’ve stopped. Maybe it would’ve saved my life. At least it would’ve saved me a whole lot of pain.”

Eve cannot fully process Niko’s words. “You _want_ me to do it?”

“I don’t want to die,” Niko’s voice quavers. “But if this is it… If this is how the story goes… Then so be it. Don’t bother feeling bad about it.”

Eve wipes tears from her cheek. Shouldn’t this be easier than the others? Niko essentially gave her permission, and yet, the knife seems to weigh a hundred pounds as she lifts it to his throat.

“I love you,” Eve whispers. Behind her, she can sense Villanelle flinching at those words.

“I’ll always love you,” Niko answers. “Don’t forget to put my body in the blender and flush me down a restaurant toilet.”

Eve freezes with the blade pressed against Niko’s neck. She knows that she should do it. She _must_ do it, or else all of the rest was for nothing. Stopping at this point won’t undo any of the damage she’s already done. But try as she might, she can’t deny it: this kill is not like the others. 

Raymond had been a monster, working for the Twelve, and would’ve killed both Villanelle and Eve if given the chance. Carolyn had been an icy manipulator who had done plenty of harm to Eve and certainly more to others in her years at MI6 that Eve would never know about.

Niko is innocent. Killing him is taking good out of the world.

Eve’s hand shakes as she stands paralyzed. She feels Villanelle come up behind her, her breath on Eve’s neck, whispering in her ear. “Don’t think about it, Eve. Show me you love me. Do it.”

The words echo in Eve’s brain. Villanelle had said the same thing before, when Eve had been gripping the handle of the axe, immobilized by fear, Villanelle had screamed, “Don’t think, Eve, do it!”

_And for what?_

Villanelle had manipulated Eve. That whole scenario had been fake. She’d had the gun the whole time and played the victim to force Eve’s hand. To control her.

And isn’t this scenario fake, too? If they’re in love… Why does it matter that Niko dies?

Eve lowers the knife and cuts the ropes binding Niko.

“What are you doing?” Villanelle croaks.

“Let’s go,” Eve says. “Leave him be.”

Villanelle’s face twists into a mask of anger. “I can’t believe I fell for it this time.” She sneers. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…”

Before Eve can blink, Villanelle slams her against the wall of the lighthouse and pries the knife from her hands. “Stop!” Eve shouts. “This doesn’t change anything. Let’s go to Alaska! Forget all of this, let’s go! You and me!”

Villanelle grabs a clump of Eve’s hair and pulls her head back, stretching her neck. “I gave you so many chances, Eve. But this was the last one. Over and over, you hurt me, and now I am going to hurt you.”

She releases Eve, throwing her against the wall one more time, and like lightning, she’s locked her arms around a still-weak Niko, pressing the knife to his throat.

“Run, Eve,” Niko gasps. “No reason for her to get both of us. Go!”

“No!” Eve screams. “Let him go. Please!”

“He was right, Eve,” Villanelle says. “This is all your fault.”

Eve is past the point of thinking critically, but knows she has to do something. She whips out the gun from her waistband and takes aim at Villanelle.

Villanelle cocks her head to the side with confusion, and Eve knows what she’s thinking. _“Are you stupid, Eve? There’s no bullets in there.”_ But before she can say anything, Eve steadies her aim and fires a shot into Villanelle’s thigh.

Villanelle cries out in pain and surprise, but keeps her arms locked around Niko. Eve fires a second shot which strikes Villanelle’s leg a few inches above the first. The second is enough to make her lose her grip on Niko and collapse to the ground. 

Eve keeps the gun trained on Villanelle, but it seems unnecessary, as she’s screaming and bleeding profusely, unable to do anything but crawl towards the lighthouse door. Niko, however, isn’t taking any chances. He tackles Villanelle to the ground, pinning her down with his full weight. She swings the knife at him in a desperate stab, but she doesn’t have the right leverage or angle, so he’s able to catch her arm and wrestle the knife out of her hands with ease. 

Eve sees that the fire has returned to Niko’s eyes, burning with fury, and for a minute, as he clutches the blade so tightly his knuckles turn white, it looks like he’s about to stab Villanelle. 

“Niko, don’t,” Eve pleads.

Niko holds the knife a few inches from her face, but concedes, “I won’t. I know you’d never be able to forgive me if I did.”

“How adorable,” Villanelle spits, panting for breath.

“Call the police,” Niko commands.

“Niko…” Eve starts. She isn’t sure of how to convince him it isn’t a good idea.

“We can’t just let her go. Call them!” Niko insists. “This is it, Eve. We’ll keep her here until they arrive, and then they’ll take her away for good.”

Eve looks to Villanelle. She stares back at Eve, and laughs weakly, her eyes colder and emptier than Eve has ever seen them. Eve averts her gaze and says, “Fine. But in the meantime we have to slow the bleeding, or she’ll die.”

Niko shifts his weight to get a better look at the wounds in Villanelle’s leg, and that is the only opening she needs to slither out from where she is pinned and throw him off her.

“No!” Niko brandishes the knife and runs to block the door, but Villanelle isn’t headed for the stairs. She staggers the other way, towards the thin railing of the balcony.

“Goodbye, Eve,” she croaks. “Don’t follow me. Even if you do, I promise, this time you won’t find me. You will never see me again.” Eve suddenly puts together what Villanelle is about to do, but it’s too late to stop her. Villanelle leans back and launches her body over the railing.

Eve rushes over to see where she fell, afraid to see Villanelle’s body broken to pieces on the rocky shore below. But when she finally brings herself to look over the edge, she can’t see Villanelle’s body on the ground. She strains her eyes, searching in the dark, but sees nothing, which means Villanelle must have fallen into the water instead.

Niko has made it to the railing as well, and looks over with Eve. “Unbelievable…” he says, with half disgust, half wonderment.

“I have to go,” Eve says, rushing towards the stairs.

“Eve, stop!” Niko says, chasing after her. “There’s no way she survived that. Even if she hit the water, the fall still could’ve killed her. And with two bullets in her leg, she can’t swim.”

Eve ignores him and rushes all the way down the spiral staircase, rushing out the door of the lighthouse towards the shore. She runs out to the very edge of the outcrop and screams, “Villanelle!”, but of course, there is no response. She searches for the slightest shape or splash in the water, but sees nothing. 

Niko catches up to her. “It’s over! Let her go!”

Although Niko’s speaking sense, Eve is not ready to accept it. She isn’t capable. She marches down the shoreline, looking out at the waves desperately for any sign of Villanelle struggling in the water. Konstantin’s words echo in her mind: _“The only change that will ever happen to Villanelle is the change from life to death.”_ It can’t be. She wants to scream at the universe, _No, I do not accept it! I demand a do-over!_

She trudges wildly through the brush and rocks along the shore, walking at least a quarter of a mile. Nothing. She falls to her knees on a gravelly stretch of beach and begins to sob.

It’s all over. Just like that. Her brain isn’t fully ready to start with “what-ifs”, though she knows she’ll tear herself apart with them soon enough, but regret and pain wash over her like the waves lapping the shore.

Eve raises her head and looks up at the moon. Despite the horrible events that have transpired, it’s a beautiful night. The moonlight glints off the waves and lights the dappled texture of the gravelly shore... _Wait._

Eve notices something a few meters farther down the shore. Is her tired, desperate brain hallucinating, conjuring up what she wants to see? She walks over to confirm, but it isn’t until her hands reach out and touch the sand that she believes it’s really there.

A set of uneven footprints, as if whoever made them was limping badly, lead out from the water. The trail stops as soon as the gravelly beach turns into grass, which is soon overtaken by woods. There would be no following it any further. 

Exhausted, Eve sits by the sea, staring at the footprints until the tide washes them away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who has been reading and offering encouragement. I wrote the first chapter as a one-shot on a whim, trying to get myself out of a rut and enjoy writing again. Everyone's positive feedback really means a lot to me and made the process of writing this story incredibly revitalizing for me, so I cannot thank you enough. <3 
> 
> I did consider a more "final" ending (in other words: Villanelle dying, since I'm like 75% sure that's the way the series will eventually end), but since I had conceptualized this as a potential season 3 arc, and the news came out that Sandra and Jodie have already signed on for a season 4... well, it didn't seem right. I have no plans to write more to this story as of now, but in the future, who knows?
> 
> Please let me know what you think, your feedback means so much to me! And come find me on [tumblr](https://imunbreakabledude.tumblr.com/) making more and more ridiculous conjectures on Killing Eve while I wait for Season 3 :)


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